Woodwalton Fen National Nature Reserve

Having spent a morning photographing Marbled White butterflies and Six-spot Burnet, Brassy Longhorn, and Burnet Companion moths on Trumpington Meadows near Cambridge I was inspired to travel slightly further afield to see if I could find any more interesting species of Lepidoptera. RSPB Hope Farm in Knapwell I remember had been productive on their pre-lockdown open days a few years ago and I remembered they had a wild patch of setaside.

Purple Emperor showing yellow proboscis

Purple Hairstreak

Brassy Longhorn

The farm and reserve are not strictly open to the public at any time other than their open days, but it’s criss-crossed by public footpaths, so you can see some of the site if you’re discrete and don’t stray into the non-public areas. While there were plenty of Meadow Brown, Six-spot Burnet, Whites, and skippers on “wild” margins, unfortunately the wild area now has a crop and so any chance of a range of Lepidoptera beyond the obvious was not going to happen.

Marbled White

So, I hopped over to Overhall Grove, a small woodland not far from Hope Farm. It’s a bluebell wood in spring and also has the relatively Oxslip ( a hybrid flower formed by the fusion of cowslip and primrose). I was too late for those, of course, but I did bump into a couple – Nick & Stella Laughton – with cameras and scopes and binoculars who were staring at the top of an elm tree. Turns out the tree was host to White Letter Hairstreak butterfly. They were very friendly and full of ideas on where else I might see other butterflies, namely Woodwalton Fen National Nature Reserve and the Newmarket “July Racecourse” end of our local Devil’s Dyke. They also mentioned I should check out the Cambs & Essex Butterfly Conservation page, where people post their sightings.

UPDATE: I bumped into Nick and Stella at Brampton Wood just after the Black Hairstreaks emerged in mid-June 2023.

Purple Emperor in flight

I took the trip to Woodwalton passing an antivivisection encampment on the way and ploughed on through to the Rothschild Bungalow. The oak trees on this site surrounding the bungalow are host to Purple Hairstreak (of which I saw at least a couple of dozen) and Purple Emperor (again maybe a dozen. One of the Purple Emperors had a perch high up in an oak on a prominent bough and would launch itself at any rival Emperors that flew too close. Indeed, it launched itself and saw off quite a few Emperor dragonflies too while I watched.

Burnet Companion at RSPB Hope Farm

Devils’ Dyke was for another morning, this time with Mrs Sciencebase. Stepping out, we spotted a pristine (presumably newly emerged) Painted Lady (not many around this year) and then a host of Chalk Hill Blues, dozens and dozens, perhaps hundreds spanning a stretch of a couple of kilometres that we walked that morning. Also many dozens of Marbled White and an occasional Six-spot Burnet. Another couple spotted a Dingy Skipper, a species I’ve never wittingly seen, but we may have seen it that morning.

Painted Lady

The Pyramidal Orchids were prominent but the much less common Lizard Orchids were past their best and we didn’t see those in bloom.

Six-spot Burnet on Field Scabious

Another species that Stella and Neil had mentioned as being at Devil’s Dyke as well as the Chalkhills was hopefully going to be Dark Green Fritillary. We passed lots of other walkers who hadn’t seen any, but then before we know it, it’s noon and the Frits suddenly appear, perhaps half a dozen or so scattered along the Dyke and being chased by the Chalkhills.

Chalkhill Blue – Male (Left) and female “in copulo”

A second visit to Woodwalton earlier in the day when the Purple Emperors were likely to be feeding on or near the ground was productive and I got snaps of that activity as well as a few better shots of the Purple Hairstreak.

Dark Green Fritillary

So, having perhaps seen fewer than 30 species of butterfly in all my 50+ years, I suddenly “ticked” another five species in the space of a week – White Letter Hairstreak, Purple Hairstreak, Purple Emperors, Chalkhill Blue, Dark Green Fritillary. Earlier in the year I’d seen Green Hairstreak at Les King Wood and last year Silver-washed Fritillary and Clouded Yellow at Waresley Wood. I have to confess I’d seen SWF in Dorset and CY in Greece in 2019), but not seen them locally until 2020.

Purple Emperor
Green Hairstreak
European Peacock

The Buff Arches moth

Some moths use pareidolia to scare away predators by flashing scary “eyes”, others disguise themselves as twigs, bark, lichen, moss. Some opt to look like leaves, yet others have more than a passing resemblance to flowers. Others spend a lowly life looking like bird droppings. This one, however, the Buff Arches, has evolved to resemble a chunk of flint lying on a woodland floor.

More moths on my Imaging Storm website  just follow the “Mothematics” menu

Enticing clearwing moths

TL:DR – One can attract clearwing moths to one’s garden with focused planting or with synthetic pheromones.


There is a beautiful group of moths known as clearwings that at first glance look rather waspish. Rather than having wings covered in scales like all of the other Lepidoptera (which roughly translates as scaly wings, or perhaps more strictly tiled wings), their wings a transparent, but for the supportive struts.

Red-belted Clearwing

These are generally day-flying moths and look like tiny shimmering jewels if you catch sight of one. The males are attracted to sex pheromones exuded by the female. As such, it is possible to draw them to a lure impregnated with the appropriate sex pheromone for each species. The moths that arrive at the lure can then be counted and ticked, perhaps even photographed in the name of (citizen) science.

Currant Clearwing

I purchased a set of pheromone lures from Anglian Lepidopterist Supplies ( a company that does exactly what it says in its name). I had previously used a lure for the Emperor moth with great success regular readers will recall. In the clearwing set there are lures for ten clearwing moth species. I began putting lures out individually on likely days – warm and breezy – back in May, but it is only into June that I’ve had success with the clearwings.

In early June, a Red-belted Clearwing was drawn to the target lure. By mid-June I was trying others and discovered that the lure for a different species, the Large Red-belted Clearwing drew in the smaller cousin – 14 of them, in fact! I put the lure out for the Hornet Moth next, no luck. Then, the  Currant Clearwing, success this time. Then I tried the Orange-tipped Clearwing lure, and drew in not the target species but a Yellow-legged Clearwing. Later, I learned from an expert name of Anthony Wren, that those two lures are identical in composition and now I am musing on what that says about the evolutionary history of these two species.

Yellow-legged Clearwing

Clearly, the lures are not 100% on point when it comes to the species they attract. Now, ALS does list non-target species for each of its lures, so it is not entirely surprising. The reason is perhaps to do with the composition of the lures.

Red-tipped Clearwing

As I understand it, the lures each have the primary sex pheromone of the target female, but they also contain a mixture of other modified, volatile fatty acids and so on. This will lead to a degree of overlap in what the lure attracts because those other chemicals may well be interesting to other species of insect. It may not be about sexual attraction it could simply be that they are attractive or stimulating molecules. There does not seem to be a whole lot of clarity in the overall picture of what does what to each species yet, although there is a huge amount of excellent and ongoing research in this area.

 

Orange-tailed Clearwing

Orange-tailed Clearwing (Synanthedon andrenaeformis) with its golden hair pencil turned up (2 or 3) at about 10am to the SYN lure in the garden on 16th June 2021.

A little bit of environmental activism can save a little life

I have mentioned the biodiversity issues on one of our local fenland drains, known as the Cottenham Lode. Over the last couple of years several of us have seen Brassy Longhorn moths feeding on the Field Scabious that grows on the lode bank at the dogleg near the footbridge into the woodland at Rampton. There has been a problem with the time of the mowing of the Lode bank, which is done each year by the Environment Agency for flood risk reduction an important maintenance job, obviously.

Brassy Longhorn feeding on Field Scabious on the Cottenham Lode

The mowing is usually done in two stages a strip towards the top of the bank is mown fairly early in the summer and the lower strip and the upper strip are then mown completely towards the end of July. Unfortunately, that full cut takes with it all the field scabious flowers, which are still blooming and with it the insect life that had until that point been thriving on the flowers. It is a crying shame one might say, especially in an age when conservation and biodiversity are high on the agenda.

I have great news to report. I have been in discussions with the Environment Agency who have now agreed to defer the first cut of the lode bank until no earlier than the week commencing 16th August this year and a similar date for future years. This means that the second, full, which takes in all of the lower part where the field scabious grow will be later still.

This will hopefully give the insect life and the wildflowers a better chance before the blades fall on them each year. So thank you to Alex Malcolm and Neil Stuttle at the EA for listening to my argument and finding a solution.

Red-belted Clearwing – Synanthedon myopaeformis

Earlier in the year, I bought myself a summer of moths – a pack of pheromone lures with which to entice clearwing moths into the garden, with a view to grabbing a quick photo opportunity and letting them on their way to find a mate etc.

Red-belted Clearwing

Regular readers will recall I have mentioned pheromone lures before in the context of the Emperor moth. The clearwings are a very different group and I’ve not had time to find out much detail about the chemistry of their pheromone attactants. Regardless, I have been putting out a lure, known as “myo” for the Red-belted Clearwing (,em>Synanthedon myopaeformis).

Red-belted Clearwing

Usually, I hang the lure in the back garden and have had no luck, but on a whim, today I put it in the front garden and within about ten minutes, a RbCw turned up. The specimen was a lot smaller than I was anticipating, but checking in my “Collins”, I see that it is a rather small moth, with a wingspan of 19-24 mm. I’d say this one was on the lower end of that size scale. Beautiful creature, obviously belted and see-through wings. If you didn’t know, you might guess at it being some kind of wasp-type insect. But, definitely no sting in the tail of this one.

Red-belted Clearwing

The species flies June to August but is rarely seen except by those with a pheromone lure for citizen science purposes. The larvae live under the bark of old apple, and other fruit trees such as pear and almond. Got the best snaps I could of this rather skittish specimen so I could let him back into the wild sooner, rather than later.

Aethes tesserana – Downland Conch

This tiny little micro moth known as Aethes tesserana is a mere 5 millimetres long. It was drawn to a 40W actinic lamp in our garden on Sunday evening (2021-06-06). It was a still and balmy evening, I seem to remember.

Incidentally, not all the micro moths are tiny, some of them are bigger than the macro moths, some of them are huge. The distinction between micro and macro is now understood to be about evolutionary history rather than size. All the butterflies sit in the micro moth grouping, being just a specific group within the moth family.

A. tesserana does have a trivial, vernacular name, it’s sometimes called the Downland Conch, and is listed as such on iRecord. However, these vernacular names are rarely official when it comes to the micro moths and indeed are frowned upon in many cases by moth-ers and lepidopterists because they are inconsistent and the scientific binomials are preferred to avoid ambiguity.

Meanwhile, some long-form reading matter for you (a book, in other words) – Much Ado About Mothing.

Much ado about mothing – Book review

For a lot of people, moths are tiny, fluttery creatures that turn to dust if you try to catch them and whose caterpillars can chew through their vegetable patch, their prize perennials, and even their carpets and clothes. Now, there are pest species, admittedly, and these can to some extent be controlled in appropriate conditions. However, for those who have been initiated into the wonders of the Lepidoptera, the 180,000 different species around the world are a natural wonder to behold.

Much ado about mothing
Some of the Sciencebase mothing kit

For those of us who do get hooked on moths – we call ourselves “moth-ers” by the way – it can become an obsession that persists from the first very first lep sighting. For those who insist that moths and butterflies are somehow different, and that butterflies are far more beautiful and far more worthy of our attention, it’s worth pointing out that all butterflies are just a single group within the Lepidoptera.

Emperor

The other groups include the noctuids (also known as owlets), the geometers (their caterpillars, larvae, measure the earth, they’re the inchworms), the sphinx moths (also known in the British Isles as the hawk-moths), and several others. Butterflies are merely one such group among the moths. Moreover, they’re actually just one group within the so-called “micro moths” (nothing to do with size, everything to do with their place on the evolutionary tree).

Gypsy Moth

It’s complicated, and all moth-ers come to the obsession through a different route. In his wonderful new book, Much Ado About Mothing, James Lowen, challenges all those dusty preconceptions about moths. He takes us on a lavish and circuitous route around the UK searching for the rarest and most intriguing of our scaly-winged insects. Incidentally, of the 180000 worldwide species a mere 2500 or so are found in the UK, some of them migrants and rare visitors.

Clifden Nonpareil

With Lowen, we clamber up mountains, we wade through marshes, and we look for what lurks in the wood and on the trees in ancient woodland. What we find is an incredibly diverse group of animals, all of them sharing common features but each very different from the next. Lowen shows us just what most people seem to miss about moths – their natural beauty.

Gold Spot

Mothing, as a hobby, is on the rise. It has often been a parallel hobby for birders, one that can be done with lures and lighttrap or even just a white sheet and a bright torch, in one’s own back garden or a local patch of countryside, and…even right in the centre of the city! Your mileage may vary on what you find, but each mothing experience brings new delights, and a new hope that the next lep to turn up will be one of the rarest of the rare or perhaps even one once thought extinct that turns out to be very much extant.

Cinnabar

If you are not yet convinced, then delve into Lowen’s book, it will astonish and intrigue even the hardiest of mottephobe, I am sure. And, remember butterflies are just one group within the moth family…and who doesn’t like butterflies?

Pale Tussock

If you love or loathe lepidoptera buy this book, Lowen’s wonderful enthusiasm will give you a mental boost either way and if you were indifferent to the scaly-winged insects, it might even let an interest pupate and to take to the air.

Lead-coloured Drab – Moth

This is a Spring moth known as a Lead-coloured Drab, Orthosia populeti, fairly certain of the ID, I couldn’t check the degree of featheriness on the antennae to be certain, it may be a different type of Drab. Its markings are not particularly remarkable, but its hairy compound eyes can be something of a talking point.

The macro shot of the moth’s left eye was taken with my camera mounted on a tripod very close to the moth. I used manual focusing in “live view” mode (i.e. focusing with the camera’s rear screen. I set the shutter to “silent” mode on put it on a 10-second timer to minimise vibration.

The camera in question is a Canon 7D mkii digital SLR (2/3 cropped frame). It was fitted with a 1:1 90mm Tamron macro lens and a 44mm extension tube to allow focusing closer than the Tamron’s standard minimum focusing distance.

Shot was taken as a 2-second exposure, with an aperture of f/7.1, and ISO 200. No flash, just ambient light and a line of LEDs about 2 inches above the moth.

My Natural Highlights of 2020

UPDATE: The news kept getting better and while things are not quite back to normal and never will be, all of those involved are in a much better place than they were at the beginning of October. This was originally posted on 10th of the month, but I’ve retagged it as New Year’s Eve 2020.

It has been a traumatic week an emotional rollercoaster to coin a cliche, you might say. There is a more positive outlook this week than there was this time last week, so I am now doing a little bit of a celebration of life with some of the interesting and intriguing species Mrs Sciencebase and I have seen this year on our rather lockdown-limited excursions.

Short-eared Owl, NT Burwell Fen – January 2020
Pipistrelle Bat day-flying along the edge of Rampton Spinney, February 2020

Female Goosander on The River Tyne near Ryton, March 2020

Emperor Moth, Cottenham – April 2020
Longhorn Moths, Rampton Spinney – April 2020
Wren, Cottenham – April 2020
Kingfisher, Wilburton – April 2020
Common Frogs, Cottenham – May 2020
Mimulus, Cottenham – May 2020
Figure of Eighty moth, Cottenham – May 2020
Curlew, Cley, Norfolk – May 2020
Red Kite, Snettisham – June 2020
Ringlet, Snettisham, Norfolk – June 2020
Brassy Longhorn, Cottenham Lode – June 2020
Corncockle, Cottenham – June 2020
Female Red-footed Falcon, RSPB Fen Drayton – June 2020
Pyramidal Orchid, Les King Wood, Cottenham – June 2020
Sandwich Tern, Hunstanton – July 2020
Fulmar, Hunstanton – July 2020
Spreading Hedge Parsley, Cottenham – July 2020
Silver-washed Fritillary, Hayley Woods, Cambridgeshire – July 2020
Rather blurry shot of a Clouded Yellow at Hayley Woods – August 2020
Bittern, RSPB Ouse Fen – August 2020
Hare, Cottenham Allotments – August 2020
Hobby, Wilburton – August 2020
Dark Crimson Underwing, Cottenham – August 2020
Osprey, Rutland Water – August 2020
Gypsy Moth, Cottenham – August 2020
Little Owl, Les King Wood, Cottenham – August 2020
Clifden Nonpareil, Cottenham – September 2020
Grounded Kestrel, Rampton Spinney – October 2020
First Merveille du Jour of the year - October 2020
First Merveille du Jour of the year – October 2020

The brand new moths of 2020

I have counted well over 300 species of moth in our garden this year(almost 9000 specimens), mostly at night, although there were one or two dayflyers (excluding butterflies, which are moths but are not usually listed as such). That is a small fraction of the total number of moth species listed in the British Isles which tallies at 2500 or thereabouts, 180,000 species of lepidoptera globally.

Of those 300 or so species about 30 were new to me having not ticked them in the garden before. Here’s a small selection starting with the rarest, the Clifden Nonpareil, a moth that was extinct in The British Isles by the middle of the twentieth century but is making a comeback.

Clifden Nonpareil
Clifden Nonpareil
Figure of Eighty
Figure of Eighty
Gypsy Moth
Gypsy Moth
Pine Hawk-moth
Pine Hawk-moth

 

Dark Crimson Underwing
Dark Crimson Underwing
The Lackey
The Lackey
Scarce Bordered Straw
Scarce Bordered Straw

The WormwoodThe Wormwood

The Knot Grass
The Knot Grass
Varied Coronet
Varied Coronet
Clouded Brindle
Clouded Brindle