The three National Moth nights. 10th-12th September 2015.

It is unusual for any natural history subject to get an airing in the national press, the radio and the television. The organisers of National Moth Night have learnt that our media needs something they can sensationalise if they are to report a story.  National Moth Night 2015 is at the time of year to target migrant species and one of the biggest and most prominent regular migrants is the Convolvulus Hawk-moth, this provided the much needed hook for the media. One of the ways of attracting some moths is by a method called sugaring, which uses a mixture of beer, treacle and sugar, plus some secret ingredients for some avid users of this method, another is to attract moths to flowers of the Tobacco plant, nicotiana. We have beer and tobacco, a moth with the wing span of a small bat and a tongue (proboscis) four inches long to reach the nectar at the bottom of the flowers, what more does the average ignorant journalist need for a story. In its news summary the BBC even dispensed with the word Convolvulus, and called it THE Hawk-moth, as if there was just one. I do have some tobacco plants in the garden and I did have some tobacco plants in the garden and I did brew up some sugaring mixture, but all the moths I caught over the three days were in my five moth traps, four mercury vapour lamps and one Actinic strip light. I didn't catch a Covolvulus Hawk-moth this year, but in the past I have caught six here, the last on 10/9/2012. 

Covolvulus Hawk-moth taken 11/9/2012

I did catch quite a few moths over the three nights and several were migrants.Below are some of the migrants caught.

Four-spotted Footman, this is the male, it is the female that has the spots.

Small Mottled Willow. It has been a record year for this little migrant.

Normally I take moths our of the trap and position them before photographing them, but today I decided to photograph them where they were, in or on the traps. 

The Silver Y is probably the commonest Lepidoptera migrant,although not necessarily the most common the come to traps. 

 Three of the four Scarce Bordered Straws I caught. One on day two and these three last night. This has been a good year for this migrant. 2006 was the best with over 160 records here, since then I've just had a few and then this year 25 so far.

 The Dark Sword-grass is one the commoner migrants, but for some reason I had fewer than usual, although it's been a good year for most recorders.

This one of the large groups of moths, normally called micros. As many are larger than the smaller macros it is a slight misnomer. This one, The Rush Veneer, in the family Crambidae is a rather insignificant, larger species.

Another from the same family, the Rusty-dot Pearl sometimes occurs in large numbers.

In many area the White Point may still be a migrant, but it would appear to have colonised in the south of England, but it still comes up as a migrant on my MapMate recording system.

The total list of migrants for the three days was 71 moths of nine species.

Code	Taxon	Vernacular	Individuals
1395	Udea ferrugalis	Rusty-dot Pearl	5
1398	Nomophila noctuella	Rush Veneer	26
2051	Lithosia quadra	Four-spotted Footman	1
2091	Agrotis ipsilon	Dark Sword-grass	1
2194	Mythimna albipuncta	White-point	5
2385	Spodoptera exigua	Small Mottled Willow	4
2400	Helicoverpa armigera	Scarce Bordered Straw	4
2441	Autographa gamma	Silver Y	25

In total, over tghree nights I caught 1928 moths of 60 species. The commonest were:

Setaceous Hebrew Characters with 923 moths

Large Yellow Underwings with 475 moths.

Light Brown Apple Moth,with 88 moths. An import from Australia many years ago, and now a pest of apple growers.

For anyone interested the full lists are on my mothing blog.

Swallows on the move.

Today was another day with substantial numbers of both Swallows and House Martins moving along the cliff top. I guess our feeling is that they are leaving our shores, their "homes" for a winter break further south, but it is probable that they were essentially African birds that evolved to travel north to make use of our summer insects when they are breeding and this would enable them to move from an extremely crowded and competitive environment.

This is one of our local breeders, taking a rest from flying in and out of the stable by the paddock, to straighten out its feathers.

Many of these birds will fly across Europe and then the length of Africa to winter in South Africa. In 1978 I spent three months in Jo'burg working on the start up of a pharmaceutical plant, and just down the road there was a reed bed  with a roost of over two million Swallows. I'm not sure which part of their breeding range they would have come from, but it would certainly mean that they would have a round trip of around 12,000 miles.

There are still a lot of Chiffchaffs around. This is another migrant, but not such a long distance traveller. \most of or Chiffchaffs end up spending the winter in southern Europe and North Africa, around the Mediterranean Sea, a strategy many would like to follow. More Chiffchaffs are wintering in the UK as our winters are becoming milder. These birds will suffer in bad winters, but in mild ones have the advantage over their travelling sibling of missing the perils of the long migration flights.

As I wandered along the cliff top I noticed this Herring Gull, already with its winter head plumage. Gone is the bright gleaming white look, and instead its been replaced with a rather grubby shawl. 

Mothing last night was very poor, I didn't catch one migrant, but I did see just one Silver Y along the cliff top. This was about a foot from the edge, and as my phone said "Welcome to France" it must have been the closest Silver Y to the border photographed today.

Lots of birders have been searching the cliffs up at Langdon, looking for the Ortolan that I photographed last week, as it reappeared in the same place yesterday. Hoping that we might even find one on the Bockhill side of the village I did scrutinise the bushes carefully, and keep and ear open for the sound of Yellowhammers. Buntings often appear in mixed groups, they have an affinity when feeding and roosting that is probably due to the safety in numbers fact. All I did find with the couple of Yellowhammers I found was a Reed Bunting. Not a rarity, but a regular migrant in small numbers here.

I did sit for a while, contemplating the world, and I noticed that I was sharing the seat with a rather nice beetle. I really know little about beetles, but I think that this one might be a Knotgrass Leaf Beetle (Chrysolina polita). I might well be wrong, If you know I am and know what it is, pleas leave a message below.