2015 – A moth summary

First blog for a bit. Been pretty busy in a pretty inhospitable part of the country (more on that hopefully soon..).

As it is New Year’s Eve as I write this I thought I’d share some wildlife highlights and statistics. Pretty dry I suppose but I kinda like it!

OK, so you remember at the start of the year I decided to get more into moths than I had in previous years? Well I did, I had my garden moth trap out pretty much once or twice (or more) a week from January all the way through to September when work took me travelling. I also bought the MapMate software (which is an impressive database which can be linked to other databases thus creating a huge one!) This has allowed me to share my moth records with the county moth recorder and I can see all the other millions of moth records for Cheshire. Anyway, using this software I’ve been able to see what the most common moths in my garden are this year. So here’s my top 10 (Which I’ve ranked by record not by individuals – some moths are more gregarious than others in the trap).

1. Large Yellow Underwing (pictured above)

2.Heart and Dart (No photo)

3. Riband Wave

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Dark Arches (No photo)

5. Willow Beauty

6. Light Brown Apple Moth (pictured above)

7. Bee Moth (No photo)

8. Lesser Yellow Underwing (no photo)

 

9. Double Square-spot

10. Common Marbled Carpet (pictured above)

 

All photos by me the author.

 

On to my favourite moths for the year – just a few a ‘top’ 5 but not in any order (and with no photos – WordPress is making it really difficult for me to lay out photos neatly and/or vaguely professionally + I don’t have any)

1. Chimney Sweeper.This is a black moth (hence the name) which looks a lot like a butterfly and also flies during the day like a butterfly. One turned up in my trap; which is remarkable as they shouldn’t turn up in moth traps due to their daytime habits (and therefore not attracted to light).
2. Wood Tiger Moth. A brightly coloured yellow black and white moth which also flies during the day. I found one in Crowden, where I was coming back from Ring Ouzel surveying. I found out via MapMate that this moth hasn’t been recorded there before now.
3. Black Rustic. One of those creatures when you flick through field guides that really stands out and that you wish you can see in the real world. It’s velvety jet black in colour and is just gorgeous and one turned up on the trap this September.
4. Oak Eggar.  Another day flying moth. This one reminds me of working in the uplands on my Ring Ouzel surveys. These moths were everywhere this summer but my stand out memory was of one in a Ring Ouzel’s beak as it was about to turn into fledgling food.
5. Streamer. By far and away the best looking moth that I found in the garden this year, this was newly emerged and was white pink and lilac in colour.

 

Streamer (photo: Author)

I’ll leave my bird highlights until tomorrow, don’t want to give an information overload here.

But the relevance to the blog title (I’m trying to keep a vague theme here!) is that all these moth records have been submitted to my local county recorder and can be potentially used (along with all the others) as a resource in the future. So if anyone is reading this and has a load of moth records (or any other records) please submit them to your local recorder!

Review: Collins Butterfly Guide

I thought I’d give reviewing stuff and things another go. My initial thoughts on reviewing items was not to limit myself to brand new stuff that’s just come out, to be honest I can’t afford to buy new books when they come out, and secondly I thought it’d be nice to review older books to see if they stack up now, or they need updating, and just to be different!

Red Admiral. Photo: Author.

A couple of years ago I had a regular task of surveying butterflies at the Dove Stone reserve, I volunteered my time once a week from April to September to regularly walk a set route (or transect) and identify and count all the butterflies I see a set distance away (I talk about this in my 4th ever post in 2013!). This was absolutely brilliant and taught me a lot about both butterflies and survey techniques. So I’ve now got an interest in butterflies.

This week I acquired a copy of the Collins Butterfly Guide: The Most Complete Guide to the Butterflies of Britain and Europe by Tom Tolman and Richard Lewington and published in 2009 (currently priced £15.90 from Amazon UK). This is one of the ‘black’ Collins guides. I now own four of them, this one, the Fungi Guide, the Tree Guide, and the birders’ bible: Bird Guide. They all have one thing in common, they are comprehensive, they don’t shy away from the details. However they all seem to be different in approach.

The Collins Bird Guide and the Fungi guide are pretty accessible, the Bird Guide in particular. The Tree guide is less so, it is pretty confusing, especially when you are trying to find native trees amongst reams and reams of obscure ornamental non-natives which inhabit the book. But it is readable.

Which brings me to my subject, the Collins Butterfly Guide. I’ll give you this description of a common butterfly, the Green-veined White.

“First Brood: ups veins lined greyish; unh yellow, veins suffused greenish: male upf apical black scaling on veins variable, sometimes vestigial; spot in s3 variable, sometimes absent: female ups and uns black markings better developed, with additional spot in s1b and s5 upf.” and it continues..

I’m pretty familiar with some technical language by now but this is a step too far. There is a glossary of abbreviations towards the start of the book and another fuller glossary towards the back to help decipher the text but you need to memorise it pretty well to use the guide efficiently. There are very roughly 1000 species described in this manner, some more briefly than others. It seems to me that the authors have set out to make the guide as incomprehensible to the casual reader as possible. Even fairly basic and common terms have been omitted, for example the familiar butterfly stages that everyone knows including small children: Egg, Caterpillar, Chrysalis, and Adult/Butterfly have been replaced with Ovum, Larva, Pupa, and Imago, which whilst technically correct could prove another barrier to a casual reader.

On top of this overly technical and abbreviation obsessed text comes an assumed knowledge that the reader has an intimate knowledge of botanical scientific names. Let’s go back to the Green-veined White, the guide describes it’s host plants (the plants which the caterpillars feed on) as thus:

“Brassicaceae, including:- Cardamine pratensis; C. amara; C. palustris, Nasturtium officinale, Lepidium heterophyllum; Lunaria rediviva;“ and again it continues..

Of all those Scintific names I only recognise the family name Nasturtium. There is no English plant names mentioned, which is odd as the book is written in English. (Scientific names are universal no matter what language, a Parus major is universal but a Great Tit in English, a Koolmees in Dutch etc.). Maybe I’m displaying my own botanical ignorance but then again I’m trying to read a book marketed to a general readership; I’ve seen this book for sale in various Waterstones branches as well as in my local library.

Now to the good bits. The accompanying drawing of the butterflies are superb as you would expect from Richard Lewington, with all butterlies drawn with wings spread and wings folded up as they would at rest, maybe one minor criticism is there is no illustrations of caterpillars but I suppose space had to be saved somewhere! The depth is astonishing, as I said above there are very roughly 1000 butterflies described and illustrated from throughout Europe, you won’t get all this in any other generalist book.

Overall I wouldn’t recommend the Collins Butterfly Guide however. The language of the text is far too technical and is as a result pretty off putting; I would suggest that future editions tone the technical stuff down a bit! If you were looking for a butterfly guide to British and Irish moths I would recommend the Pocket Guide to Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland published by British Wildlife Publishing (£9 from Amazon UK), this again has great illustrations by it’s author Richard Lewington but it also has a very readable accompanying text. The various life-cycles such as egg caterpillar and chrysalis are also illustrated too. This book just focuses on butterflies found in the UK and Ireland so you don’t have to sift through 101 different European species of Grayling to get to your potential British butterfly. I could possibly suggest the Collins Guide to anyone touring Europe, it would just about fit nicely into a backpack for instance, it’s definitely not a coffee table book, just swat up on the abbreviations and the glossary beforehand! But if you are going to a specific country I’d probably try and source a country specific guide.

Thanks for reading this far!!

PS: Thanks to HIHO for adding me to their list of great-uk-bloggers on twitter! I’m humbled!

This time last year

This week, due to the balmy British weather(!), the weekly volunteering session was cancelled. Unfortunately at Dove Stone we couldn’t get up to the moor as the snow had drifted across the access road. The sphagnum in the buckets were frozen solid too. So I was at a bit of a loss as to what to post this week.

My mind has been drifting to this time last year when the weather was a lot warmer. In fact the weather was unseasonably warm ironically, so much so that I could start butterfly surveying.

Last year I was assigned a butterfly transect walk at RSPB Dove Stone (specifically the shore of Yeoman’s Hay and Dove Stone reservoirs) which ran from April 1 to September 30, but if the conditions were favourable I could start early.

So armed with a clip board, a compass, an anemometer, a butterfly net and a butterfly ID book I began my survey. The conditions needed to be specific, temperature above 13°C (preferably above 17°C), not too windy, and not too cloudy. The first survey was a bit light on numbers, only four butterflies seen (two commas Polygonia c-album, a small tortoiseshell Aglais urticae, and a peacock Inachis io), but it was a great first step for me in the field of butterfly surveying having never done it before.

By the time the end of September came I was practically an expert (yer right!) in butterfly surveying, and my knowledge of the insects went from nothing at all virtually to pretty decent in six months.

Small Copper, taken by me at the end of August 2012

Hopefully the weather will improve, and next week’s post should be more relevant!