Two half-decent moth nights

Saturday and Sunday nights were not ideal conditions, but they were DRY! Hurrah! In fact the dry from Saturday night lead onto the very lovely morning walk that I posted about yesterday at Cannock Chase. The evening temperatures were around 12 degrees on Saturday but 10 degrees on Sunday, but given that both nights were fairly similar I decided to run an experiment testing the lights against each other. I ran the 15W Actinic/117W CFL combo trap on Saturday and the 80MBF on Sunday. Same trap, same setup just different lights.

The results were...

Saturday		Sunday
Micros	Macros	Micros	Macros
6	20	5	19

...rather inconsequential to be honest - although Saturday's catch was fairly uneventful (Freyer's Pug, Scoparia ambigualis, Silver Y and Ingrailed Clay being the only interesting moths) the MBF bulb did pull in Poplar Hawk, Pale Tussock, Angle Shades, Scoparia pyralella, Peppered Moth, Clouded-bordered Brindle and Cabbage Moth. So I'm tempted to say that the MBF was more successful, but that's only cos the bigger showy moths grab your attention, don't they!?!

Any way some photos from Saturday first:

Silver Y

Heart & Dart

Ingrailed Clay

Scoparia ambigualis

And some from Sunday:

Angle Shades

Scoparia pyralella
(nice comparison to S. ambigualis above)

Marbled Minor agg.

Foxglove Pug

Peppered Moth

Bryotropha similis (I think?)

2012 Moth Yearlist = right on the verge...99

Another armchair tick!

So there's a good reason that I've spent so many hours photographing EVERY moths that I caught last year (well all those that looked different anyway!)

I'm currently updating my lifelist page with small thumbnail images, and whilst looking through my photos from the 2nd June 2011 I flicked past this one which immediately stopped me in my tracks as I new instantly what it was.

Don't ask me how I missed this fantastically different Scoparia pyralella, but I did! It's sharp gold coloured spots stood out in the photo, maybe they didn't whilst I was photographing it. Then again there were a lot of moths to photograph from that trap (83 of 40 species - 41 species now!) so maybe it was all a bit rushed. Anyway, it slots into my list as number 291.