TL:DR – There are 8 billion people alive on the planet, right now. Eight thousand million humans. That’s 8,000,000,000. It’s a big number.
Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.” There have been at least 100 billion humans since the first of our ancestors made that one giant step down from the trees for mankind. However, look to the future now, we’ve only just begun…there will come a point, where total membership of the human race, living and dead, may well be numbered in the trillions.
So…
How special are you? Are you a member of the elite or just one of the great unwashed? If you’re reading this blog, it’s most likely that you’re just like me in many ways, nothing like one in a million, just one of several billion. An average Joe or Joanna Bloggs, as it were.
But, we feel special inside, don’t we? We feel that we’re important, at least to that inner self. We don’t want to be just a number and so we try to fill our lives with activity and stuff – family, friends, jobs, cars, houses, holidays, hobbies…we also grasp at the very few people we perceive as being a little bit more special than us, celebrities, perhaps, great musicians, sportspeople, medal winners, Nobel laureates, world leaders, religious leaders, monarchs even. Achievers.
We grasp at them and feel that we know them through their presence in our world, their place at the top of some great pile. We queue to buy tickets to watch their performances on the pitch and their pitch-perfect playing. We follow their every move and hang on their every word through the lens of media, both social and unsocial…antisocial. We study them and watch in awe as they do their thing, whether that’s shaking it or sharing it.
When they die we mourn them like close friends, like relatives. We feel the loss, we are bereft. Another one of us gone. One of the special ones. When once we queued to see them incarnate, in the living flesh, we might now queue in our thousands to seem them lying in state. We want to feel connected, we want some of their special to magically be infused into our being. We don’t want to be ordinary, we want to be extraordinary, like them.
TL:DR – I’ve been mothing since July 2018. In 2022, I recorded almost 50 new species in my garden. It was just 37 in 2021, and 30 in 2020.
As the year rolls by, the number of new moth species a novice moth-er with 3-4 years experience is likely to see on any given night declines with the arrival of autumn. All the moths I saw in my first season were pretty much new-for-me (NFM), about 127 species. In 2019, lighting up for a longer period, I recorded 125 NFM. 2020 wasn’t a great year not many moths at all after an unseasonably warm and sunny pre-Spring and I recorded just 30 NFM. Similarly, 37 NFM in 2021. However, despite odd weather again in 2022, I’ve recorded 49 NFM in the garden and a dozen with the LepiLED in the New Forest.
Among those NFM species was the fabulous and rather rare Convolvulus Hawk-moth. Several (perhaps 5) have turned up in our garden, perhaps drawn to the nectar of the tobacco plants we grew especially for them.
There are, of course, plenty of autumnal moths and maybe a clutch of those have not been ticked. Then, there are the recent additions to the British List, such as Clancy’s Rustic. Clancy’s Rustic Caradrina kadenii
(Freyer, [1836]) which was first reported by Sean Clancy in Kent in 2002.
One turned up in the garden last night, looking quite fresh. I thought I’d seen one before in 2020 but when I double-checked my records it turned out to have been the rather similar-looking Pale Mottled Willow, which is quite common in my garden. So, at last I can tick one of the rarest of the rare moths, Clancy’s Rustic as NFM.
There are so many “hairstreak” butterflies around the world, members of the Theclinae, with lots of tribes. Indeed, nobody knows for sure how many of these delightful little creatures adorn our world. In the UK, we have just five of them as native species, and they’re quite rare and tend to live and breed only in small pockets.
In 2021, I saw my first Green, Purple, and White-letter Hairstreaks with a little bit of guidance from some butterflyers I’ve mentioned before. In 2022, I made a concerted effort to try and find at least one of the two others that are not too far to drive from home – the Black Hairstreak. I may have glimpsed it in 2021, but I definitely saw and photographed it in a place called Monks Wood one of its rare habitats.
The fifth the Brown Hairstreak has a flying season August-September and we tried to spot it on our final day on the edge of the New Forest where there was plenty of fresh blackthorn (the larval foodplant) but with no luck. A possible trip to nearer Suffolk might have been productive, but it’s probably too late in the year for it now, so Brown HS is going to be a target there for me in 2023 instead.
In the meantime, you can catch up with some of the 50 butterflies and 460 moths I’ve photographed and videoed for Reels on the Sciencebase Instagram
UPDATE: A rather battered Connie turned up on the night of 8th September. That’s three nights we’ve seen the species in the garden, it’s possible there were two on the first occasion (27 August), but just one on 2nd September, and just one last night. Although there’s no way of knowing for sure, there may have been others on those nights and other nights, all may well have been attracted by the scent of the garden tobacco plants we grew specifically to attract this species. All were subsequently drawn to the UV lure.
Usually, one relies on Attenborough and his marvellous army of photographers and researchers to bring the dramatic natural world closer to home. At a push Spring Watch and its ilk can give you a slightly less educational fix with their low-level narrative and low-level cameras. But, nature impinges on even the most urbane of urban gardens at times.
Indeed, we see various butterflies in the garden on warm and sunny summer days – Comma, Painted Lady, Red Admiral, Peacock, Whites (Large and Small), Holly Blue, very occasionally Common Blue and Small Copper, even (once) Marbled White. Hummingbird Hawk-moths turn up during the day and with a little luring, Emperor Moth and various Clearwings. I’ve listed the birds elsewhere on Sciencebase.com, we’ve ticked 30 species in the garden or over it. At night, there are hedgehogs and the Common Frogs are active in and around the pond. Speaking of which various dragonflies and damselflies around the pond and their larvae in it. Also at night, Pipistrelle bats circulating, hunting for moths…oh…moths.
As regular readers will know, surely…I light up with an ultraviolet “lemp” to attract moths and record and photograph them. 459 species so far in four years of mothing. One of the most intriguing and, I feel, exciting visitors was the Convolvulus Hawk-moth. It nectared on Nicotiana (garden tobacco plants) planted specifically to give it something to eat should it turn up. As you know, it did and then again this evening. It’s a huge beast, three or four inches across, it makes a lot of noise whirring and whirling around the garden and clacking into walls and plant pots in between bouts of unfurling its enormous proboscis to feed.
A second, possibly third, one appeared to nectar and then was distracted by the lemp. I got some video of the Convolvulus Hawk-moth just before it dived into the trap. But, I couldn’t leave it there to fester overnight so I lifted the lid to let it out. It soured away into the night sky, like a whirring wraith in a pink and black stripey mohair rollneck. Who needs Sir David, when you’ve got plain David? Hah!
My very good friend Vicki who is a fellow birder, former moth-er, and archaeology enthusiast, suggested I write about photographing wildlife for my next column in our village newsletter. So, putting proverbial pen to paper while inspiration struck, here’s what I came up with in fifteen minutes…
What’s the one thing you definitely need to get a decent wildlife photograph? There are myriad answers that come to mind – an expensive camera, a big zoom lens, a portable hide and a Ghillie suit, a fancy tripod and a Bluetooth shutter release app? Those things might help and you could always put them on your Christmas wishlist, of course. But, probably the most important thing to have is a good supply of patience.
A chance encounter with Tarka
Now, I am not saying I’ve got plenty of that or even that I take decent wildlife photographs, but certainly you can have the most sophisticated (for which generally read: expensive) photographic equipment but if you don’t have a little patience, then it’ll be down to pure luck that you get the shot you hoped for, the one that might win prizes or find a place in a charity calendar, for instance.
Spoonbills – the bird that brings its own cutlery to tea
Occasionally, you might stumble across a sight for sore eyes, such as a kingfisher, a little egret, and a great white egret all feeding on the same patch of the Cottenham Lode, or a grey heron gulping down a whole water vole*, or an otter grooming itself on the bank of the Great River Ouse. You might spot a rare bird of prey, such as a Montagu’s Harrier quartering farmland or even stumble across a congregation of more than 80 common buzzards drawn to a field near Soham at the end of August when the farmer was moving haybails and disturbing countless tasty rodents. Such is life that to get those decent wildlife shots you need luck more than patience and to be in the right place, at the right time, as they say.
In-flight Kingfisher
So, this worrying concept of patience…is there an app for that? Unfortunately not. Aside from the lucky find, if you’re hoping for a decent or even just a half-decent wildlife photograph, you’re going to have to spend quite a bit of time in the great outdoors. Keeping a keen eye on every tree, every hedgerow, every stream, and always with a weather eye to the sky for the airborne wildlife.
But, as we perhaps all learned, time in the great outdoors is a precious commodity, it can’t be replaced with a virtual reality headset, you simply don’t get the sun on your face, the mud on your boots, nor the wind in your hair [present company excepted, Ed.] Regardless of what kit you’re carrying whether high-end smart phone, a professional digital SLR with all the trimmings, or a more cheap and cheerful device, take some time, look around, and get a bit snap happy with the wildlife that’s out there.
*Incidentally, I saw the heron eating the vole but I was nowhere near quick enough to get my camera pointed at the bird and its lunch before the unfortunate mammal was gone.
TL:DR – There was a sudden influx of more than 100 Common Buzzards (Buteo buteo) on farmland after the hay was cut and baled. This species is a type of hawk, not a vulture.
When you get wind of something unusual in the birding world, the temptation is often to head for the site as quickly as possible binoculars slung around your neck and camera in the rucksack on your back. It’s often not the best strategy, birds fly and even if you think you’re being quick off the mark, often the update you saw may be out of date within minutes or hours of it being posted.
Common Buzzard zoomed through the heathaze
So, when I heard there was a large number of Common Buzzard* (Buteo buteo) gathered in a field not 20 minutes’ drive from home, I didn’t jump into the car and slam the pedal to the metal. I waiting until the next update to see how things might be changing over the hours from the first sighting to the next.
The initial report had said there were some 56 Buzzards in a field where the farmer was moving hay bales. The rodent population would have been on the run and it was presumably this that drew the avian crowd, which was apparently joined by a Marsh Harrier, Kestrel, and several Grey Herons. There were several more Buzzards in the adjacent field, apparently. This is an unprecedented number of this species in Cambridgeshire, a county record. Usually, they seem quite solitary and might gather in thermal-circling groups of three or four.
Four of at least 100 Common Buzzards on local farmland
Most I’ve ever seen in one place was directly above our house when there were six riding ever upwards on the thermals. More than sixty in one place seemed bizarre…something you might see in some remote Eastern European valley or flying over Gibraltar Point, perhaps.
Anyway, I still didn’t dash. I was dithering. Worrying about the spiralling cost of diesel, for one thing, but also with the thought that by the time I get to this distant field, Sod’s law would dictate that they would have all departed. The next report came in and said there were perhaps eighty, the one after that told of at least 100 and maybe more in the trees and the fields beyond. So, with a rather pessimistic hat on and in no great rush, I made a coffee in a travel mug, grabbed my camera and binoculars, and headed for the fens.
I pulled up in a layby at the grid reference where all the reports said the Buzzards were to be seen. Pulling on the handbrake I glanced across the fields, they look bare but for grass slowly recovering after successive heatwaves. But for a Kestrel faffing with a vole and a couple of Black-headed Gulls, there seemed not to be much in what had temporarily been Buzzard country…
Not wanting to give in to the disappointment, I got out of the car and focused the binoculars into the middle distance, about 150 to 200 metres, I’d say. First one, then two, three, four Buzzards popped into existence, scattered randomly across the field. As my eyes shifted gear from fenland driving mode to birding mode, I scanned the field and started a more singular count…I got to 26. 26 Common Buzzards, more than I’d ever seen in one place before.
Not bad, a nice number. It was at this point that I trained the bins a little farther into the agricultural distance and realised the field behind and the one to the side had a lot more Buzzards than the nearest. I counted seventy for sure before a flock of them took to the air from the overhead wires, the trees and the hedgerows making a definitive total harder to count. It’s hard to know for sure, one report had indeed said there were 100+, I suspect I saw that many, maybe more this morning. On the other side of the road behind me the fields there had just two or three more Buzzards, another Kestrel, or perhaps the same one relocated, and a Red Kite overhead.
The Common Buzzard is, despite its name, is not particularly common, a few tens of thousands of breeding pairs in the UK. Much maligned and persecuted through ignorance like so many raptors (birds of prey) through the years, there was a time in recent history when you might live a country life and not see one. It’s a protected species now and no longer considered to be under any great threat from those that might have trapped and killed it in years past. The biggest threats today for the bird and pretty much every other species on earth is habitat loss, desertification, and climate change.
Anyway, I was glad a made the effort and used a splash of diesel to see this spectacle. I won’t reveal the location here for obvious reasons, but feel free to email me if you want to see them and wish the birds no harm. I cannot guarantee they’ll still be there by the time you read this, but you never know.
*American readers will be familiar with Buteo species but know them as hawks rather than buzzards. The term buzzard in American English is a colloquial term that oftens refers to the Turkey Vulture, Cathartes aura, which is related to the South American Condor rather than the vultures of Africa, or to the Black Vulture, Coragyps atratus.
Having written about one of the bigger moths we see in the UK, Connie, the migrant Convolvulus Hawk-moth, it only seems fair to give a mention to a micro, as opposed to macro moth. So, here’s the Garden Rose Tortrix.
Garden Rose Tortrix
Now, the macro versus micro label may well have been historically about size. The larger moths being macro, the smaller moths being micro, as you might imagine, but there are so many enormous micro moths and so many tiny macro moths in the world that this really doesn’t hold. In fact, the division is one of evolutionary history, the micro moths being a much older grouping.
The micro grouping includes all of the butterflies, which are essentially just a family of micro moths. The only physiological difference between what British English thinks of as butterflies and moths is that the butterflies cannot unhook their forewings from their hindwings. That’s it. Asking what’s the difference between a butterfly and a moth is like asking what’s the difference between a ladybird and a beetle, or a dog and a mammal…
Anyway, back to today’s micro. This tiny two-toned moth is known as a Garden Rose Tortrix, Acleris variegana. It is one of about 11000 worldwide moths that are members of the tortrix family, the Tortricidae. They’re so-called because their larvae roll themselves up in a leaf to pupate and metamorphose into the winged, adult. The word tortrix has the same etymology as the word torque, the word for a twisting force – torquere, meaning to twist.
Earlier this year, our choir got invited to sing (again) with The London Community Gospel Choir, you know, the choir led by the Reverend Bazil Meade that are on the original Tender by Blur and have also worked with Justin Timberlake, Madonna, Gorillaz, and Kylie Minogue. Amazing, yes? What an opportunity. Big crowd too as we would see.
Anyway, there was a powercut during soundcheck, so we didn’t get as much of a chance to run through our supporting set before the show as we’d hoped. No matter. It would be fun, we’d have to wing it, and the crowd were there for the LCGC not us. We also had to run through the two songs we’d be singing with the choir itself during their set – a gospel classic and a Meade original.
The members of the choir, all very friendly, pulled us into their fold, told us to huddle among the numerous stage mics, to not be shy, to sing out loud, sing out proud, sing out strong. One of the soloists, a guy who towered over me by at least a foot and a half, nudge me forward during the soundcheck, basically pushed the mic into my face, “This is you, go for it!” So, I did…like I do…
Well, all rolled off stage, and headed to the “green room” as it was, realised it was all too hot and sweaty in there and wended our way on to the lawned area behind the venue. It was not quite the 2022 heatwave at this point, but that was fast approaching. It was well above 30 degrees on stage when we ran our support set…which went down well. We do an ironic mashup of Blur’s Tender with the Oasis song Champagne Supernova, arranged by our pianist, the inimitable Tim Lihoreau. Meade but on a good show of being impressed, even if it was his song and the Blue-Oasis tension may well have passed him by at the time anyway.
So far, so good. Always enjoy applause and plaudits even if there was one negative comment about the red flower in my black felt hat for the Harry Styles number we did.
Okay, so proper showtime…we’re in the audience at this point, enjoying the LCGC show proper. We’ll get a nod to head backstage towards the end to join them for Oh, Happy Day and then the Meade song as finale. Fun AND games.
We shuffle on, trying to look impressive, but paling into insignificance among the mighty LCGC. I take my place, but Mr Tall Guy isn’t giving any leeway on that mic, it’s up to his head height and I’m down below. Ah, well. It’s his show, just meant I had to sing louder, which I did. I’m not in a choir called bigMouth for nothing, after all.
As regular Sciencebase readers will know by now, this once workaholic science writer is now a highly dedicated mother. As in I am an enthusiastic amateur Lepidopterist. A moth-er, like a bird-er, birder, someone keen to see, observe, understand, and perhaps photograph the subject. This year and last, I’ve also been a bit more focused on being a butterflyer too.
Toadflax Brocade larva with one of its foodplants, Purple Toadflax
Anyway, part of being a mother usually involves finding ways to see moths. Commonly that involves some kind of lure – a pheromone bung or an ultraviolet (or other) light. And, again, as you will know, I’ve got several lures for enticing moths for observation and the inevitable photoshoot. At the time of writing, I’ve lured and photographed about 450 moths of the 2600 species found in the UK.
Adult Toadflax Brocade moth
The standard approach to nocturnal mothing is to have a box above which a bright light or bright UV source is suspended, often above a funnel or vent. Moths are drawn to the lamp, like moths to a flame but without the fire risk. They might circulate a while and will often spiral or dive into the funnel opening or the vent and then find it rather difficult to navigate their way out again. A good mother will have pre-filled the trap with lots of empty cardboard egg trays. The trapped moths will settle down in the nooks and crannies of these trays for the night ready to be logged and photographed in the morning.
Moth-trap lamps do not only attract moths, beetles, flies, wasps, hornets, worms, snails, slugs, all kinds of creatures will be drawn. But, it also seems so will the larvae of moths, the caterpillars. A few mornings back, while logging the night’s moth haul (before release into undergrowth away from the garden) I found in one of the egg trays, a couple of caterpillars, larvae of the Toadflax Brocade moth. They must have wriggled all the way from the other side of the garden, about 12 metres where there is a patch of Purple Toadflax or perhaps 15 metres from the Common Toadflax (Butter-and-Eggs) patch to the patio whereupon the moth trap sits on lighting-up nights.
Toadflax Brocade in its cardboard cocoon
The two larvae were pupating and using tiny fragments of the cardboard egg tray to make their protective cocoon. One had made a good start and was almost completely enclosed ready for its metamorphosis, the other had a long way to go and so was still very exposed and so obviously a Toadflax Brocade larva. I’ve relocated the egg tray to an under-cover bench outside the garden shed where hopefully the two will finish their transformation and emerge at some point in 2023 as adult moths. I’ll keep you informed as to their progress if anything changes in the meantime.
TL:DR – The Convolvulus Hawk-moth is an infrequent visitor to British gardens, but they do occasionally turn up, having crossed the channel, and there is evidence of breeding here, but not over-wintering yet. Several were attracted to Nicotiana I grew especially for them.
UPDATE: 8 Sep 2024 Finally, annother Connie, no Nicotiana, just turned up, hung around the wisteria, flew off.
UPDATE: 1 Sep 2022 Another arrived in the garden tonight less than a week after the first, it nectared on the still blooming Nicotiana before diving into the actinic moth trap. I lifted the lid to let it out and it soured away into the night sky, like a whirring wraith in a pink and black stripey mohair rollneck.
The Convolvulus Hawk-moth, named for its larval food plant convolvulus (bindweed) and its hawk-like appearance, is a relatively rare visitor to the UK from mainland Europe.
Convolvulus Hawk-moth, Agrius convolvuli
The books usually say it migrates rarely and will be seen only in the South West of England if it does, but it has appeared elsewhere, often carried in on the same weather as other migrants, such as the Hummingbird Hawk-moth. There’s also the likelihood of the offspring of Spring migrants appearing as adults in the late summer.
The species’ wingspan can be 85 to 120 millimetres, as big as the British Privet Hawk-moth and with those pink and black stripes it’s almost like a close cousin.
The Convolvulus Hawk-moth likes to nectar on tobacco plants and ginger lilies among other flowers and I have been growing the former in our back garden since I started mothing in the hope of seeing a Convolvulus. After our trip to the New Forest with the LepiLED,* I reverted to my trusty 40W actinic trap next to the tobacco plants for the first evening lighting up back home. Within 20 minutes or so I could hear a whirring, humming insect near the plants and with a torch caught site of it with its huge compound eyes glowing like embers in the air. It did not stay long and flew off over neighbouring gardens. I mused on it being another migrant, perhaps a Striped Hawk-moth of which there had been many recent reports across East Anglia and the southern counties, but this moth was bigger, a lot bigger.
I could confirm the Convolvulus ID when it (presumably the same insect) made another appearance in the garden five minutes later. There have been several reports of Convolvulus in the county this year already, so this wasn’t the first.
The one in our garden, sucked a little nectar from the flowers of the garden tobacco plants before heading for the UV lamp and diving into the trap. I quickly took the trap indoors and got setup for a photoshoot. I snapped a few closeups of this beautiful moth before releasing it back to the night air.
As you can see from my photos it has some of the character of the Privet Hawk-moth, another member of the Sphingidae (what the Americans call Sphinx moths as opposed to Hawk-moths). Wingspan can be between 85 and 120mm, this one, I estimated was about 110mm across.
Convolvulus Hawk-moth, with 50mm battery for scale
Convolvulus often appears alongside other migrants. It has been a particularly good summer for the distant, much smaller cousin, the Hummingbird Hawk-moth, as I’ve mentioned here and on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The Striped Hawk-moth has been reported widely, and I am still hoping that one will turn up here, it would be a grand end to our holiday period if it were to join the Convolvulus in making a late Summer appearance.
*The holiday mothing was limited to lighting up with the LepiLED and logging the Lepidoptera in the morning, most of our adventures were out and about in the local countryside and on the coast. The more general photos from our trip will appear in good time, but right now I am focused on the Convolvulus.