Months ago, at the beginning of lockdown 1.0 I think I mentioned nocmigging. It’s the nocturnal audio recording and analysis of overnight sounds that might include the calls of migrant birds flying overhead. In April, I set up a microphone and recording software and poked it out of my office window and left it running overnight. In the morning I checked to see what had recorded and sadly it seemed at the time that the software had failed and all I had was the first 20 minutes from when I set things running.
NocMig recording in Audacity Spectrogram view showing the rise of the dawn chorus, 2020-04-07
I had tried a few more times and had managed to record the dawn chorus once or twice, but I didn’t think I had captured a long period of nocturnal noises until I was scanning my hard drive with the aim of deleting unwanted large files to clear some space. I found a 6h45m 4.5 gigabyte audio file. Exciting stuff.
So, now processing with Audacity in spectrogram view with the aim of feeding the output into the nocmig software. Here’s how to configure audacity for a nocmig recording.
Turns out there’s very little to hear other than occasional motorbikes and cars, at least until the first Blackbird of the dawn chorus, followed by Robins, Dunnocks, Wrens, and Wood Pigeons. Nothing was apparent and high-pitched in the spectrogram during the preceding hours. And, an audio scan didn’t even give me muntjac, foxes, nor even cats in the night, possibly one very distant dog barking. It was all very quiet, sadly. Still, there’s always next year.
UPDATE: Greece, June 2024 – Added Catocala nymphaea to my list of photographed Erebid “underwings”.
UPDATE: New Forest, 25 Aug 2022 – I finally trapped the Light Crimson Underwing (Catocala promissa) at our holiday house in North Poulner, Hampshire, which completes the British set for me, I believe. There’s a short video clip of the LCUW on the Sciencebase Instagram, with Going to the Chapel as the background music for good reason.* In the summer of 2023, Adrian Matthews caught an LCUW in Chesterton, a first for Cambs.
Light Crimson Underwing, Catocala promissa
The Catocala moths are a group of relatively large moths in the family Erebidae. They are often known as “underwing moths” because of the intriguing colours and patterns of their hindwings, which are usually hidden from view under the forewings while the moths are at rest and only revealed either in flight or when the insect is startled.
Not to be confused with dozens of others species in the Noctuidae that have the word underwing as part of their common name (e.g. Yellow Underwing, Straw Underwing, etc) and Geometridae (Orange Underwing).
Clifden Nonpareil, Catocala fraxini, the Blue Underwing
These large Catocala underwings are not common in The British Isles and where they are known are often localised to particular niches. In my time mothing since late July 2018, I have trapped, photographed and released three of the group: Red Underwing, Dark Crimson Underwing, and the (once extinct here) Clifden Nonpareil (the Blue Underwing). Actually, I had the Red in the garden in 2019 and then saw it a few days later on a camping trip to the eastern coast of Norfolk.
Red Underwing, Catocala nupta
I am yet to see the Oak Yellow Underwing, the Rosy Underwing, the Minsmere Red Underwing, or the French Red Underwing. There are 30 Catocala species in Europe and 250 globally.
Red Underwing, Catocala nupta, wings hiddenDark Crimson Underwing, Catocala sponsaDark Crimson Underwing, Catocala sponsa, camouflaged on mottled bark
*Interesting to note that they all have scientific names alluding to nuptials and wedding nights. The naturalists who named them, whimsically imagining that the brightly coloured hindwings were like a bride’s brightly coloured bloomers! So we have C. sponsa, C. nuptia, and C. promissa. The Clifden Nonpareil is the exception, its scientific name, C. fraxini, alluding to the ash tree, wholly inappropriately as its food plant is the aspen.
More moths, birds, and other nature shots via the Sciencebase Instagram, please join me there.
Clifden Nonpareil – For the incomparable moth from Clivedon House, blue is the colour!
Blue is not a common colour in British moths
The UK Moths website described Catocala fraxini as the Victorian collector’s classic all-time favourite”. It also goes by the name of the Blue Underwing because of the shock of blue on the hindwings, which are usually covered by the forewings when the moth is at rest and are exposed when it reacts to a threat.
C fraxini feeds on aspen rather than ash (the frax of its name)
The moth was well known in the British Isles in Kent and Norfolk until the middle part of the the 20th century, the site explains, but it ultimately became extinct in terms of being a breeding resident on these shores and was seen only occasionally by lepidopterists as a vagrant immigrant from the continental mainland.
C.fraxini on an NCL rule for scale
Thankfully, the species has been gaining new traction in the South of England and in East Anglia. It is now thoughtto be recolonising and is almost certainly breeding in the south. As an amateur moth-er, I hoped to draw this species beyond compare to the actinic lure I light up some nights in our Cambridgeshire garden. I didn’t hold out much hope until I heard on the mothing grapevine that there had been one or two sighted in neighbouring counties.
Blue Underwing with my secondhand copy of Manley behind
Then, in the middle of August, a fellow moth-er at the other end of our village here, reported a sighting of a Clifden in his garden. At the time, the closest I came to the fabled Blue, was another Catocala species, the Dark Crimson Underwing, that came to the actinic lure (it’s just a UV lamp, by the way). The Dark Crimson is usually confined to the New Forest, I was happy to see it.
A couple of weeks later my village friend reported a second Blue and his own NFG (new for the garden) Dark Crimson. I had my fingers crossed as tightly as they can be, but no luck. The autumn kicked, in then a mini-heatwave or two. There were endless Large Yellow Underwings (which are unrelated to the Catocala species, being Noctuidae rather than Eribidae. There were also lots of Lunar Underwings, yet another noctuid with veiny forewings and a moon-like crescent on each hindwing. Lots of Square-spot Rustics too and the Black Rustics of autumn. But no Blue.
Finally, on the night of 28th September at about 22h50, I let the dog into the garden for her late-night ablutions and checked the actinic lure, immediately spotting lots of craneflies on the adjacent wall, a Lunar Underwing on the box itself and…oh…there…an enormous speckled, patterned, grey moth with its shimmering band of blue on each hindwing exposed when the moth is disturbed. It truly is beyond compare, nonpareil.
This specimen was a little battered by the time it reached my lure. It is about 48 mm from palps to the tip of its folded forewings. The books describe it by wingspan which can be 80 to 90 mm. For a British species, it is truly enormous and impressive, not quite as big as our largest resident the Privet Hawk-moth which can be up to 120mm when its wings are fully expressed.
As winter encroaches (it’s mid-September and we’re in the middle of an Indian Summer here in East Anglia, ahem), the (Red) Knot, Calidris canutus, start to flock on The Wash and their tidal activity can be seen as the waves break repeatedly and these waders take to to the air in their thousands, if not tens of thousands.
We were treated to a wader wonder on 17th September 2020, at Snettisham Beach on the North Norfolk coast. Patiently we watched the tide rise and the birds feeding and occasionally flocking. At the point there was essentially no visible mud flat remaining, the birds flock and make like a murmuration of starlings, whirling and cavorting in a seemingly coordinated way. Sometimes they head further out to sea, but occasionally a flock will fly overhead and head for the lagoons behind us. It is quite incredible, the sight and the sound.
Difficult to time it just right. It has to be the perfect tide, the right conditions, and you have to be lucky to be there.
With Covid-19 lockdown hitting some people very hard, it seems churlish to complain about its effects on me. It felt hard – no pub visits with friends, no limited time outdoors and so not much chance for nature photography and long walks with the dog, no rehearsing with C5 The Band nor the TyrannoChorus choir, no panto to plan for etc, like I say, relatively easy, but still hard.
Dark Crimson Underwing
As such, I was really hoping for an exciting moth year to keep me sane, and I have had some crackers, but numbers and diversity seem to have been low…all I’ve really seen for the last couple of weeks are quite a few Large Yellow Underwings and Square Spot Rustics and little else.. They’re of interest in their own right, of course, but once you’ve seen a few dozen, you’ve seen them all.
Gypsy Moth
I am yet to see the so-called Blue Underwing, the Clifden Nonpareil, a beautiful and fascinating European species that seems to be spreading northwards (I hear they’ve been ticked in Shropshire now). It’s odd a fellow moth-er in this village had two of these a couple of weeks ago. I did see its relative the Dark Crimson Underwing a month before he did. That species is usually only seen in the New Forest but is also spreading its wings so to speak.
UPDATE: Clifden Nonpareil actually turned up at the end of September.
Clifden NonpareilFigure of Eighty
Anyway, without going into all the statistical detail of 250 or so species I’ve noted this year so far more than 30 of them were new for the garden (NFG), new to me (NTM), in fact, I’d not seen them live before. Where a name has “agg” that means aggregate and it is to mark those species that look superficially identical to others and cannot be separated into distinct species without dissection or DNA analysis.
There is a whole group of moths called “carpets”. Despite (un)popular opinion about moths they do not eat carpets. Indeed, there are only one or two British moths (out of 11000 species!) that feed on wool and other textiles.
No, these moths are called carpets because when they were identified and scientifically named carpets were luxury items and the naturalists wanted to honour the beauty of these little creatures by naming them after something luxurious. This Green Carpet, Colostygia pectinataria, was drawn to the actinic light in our back garden last night and photographed this morning.
I’ve mentioned RSPB Ouse Fen a lot over the last few years, it’s a lovely quiet patch of flooded gravel pits, with some woodland, and reedbeds etc, not far from where we live. There are two ways to get to it, one is a lot closer and takes you into the reedbed side of the reserve, the far side is a longer drive and takes you through the more wooded areas. Both are nice, but I tend to favour the reedbed side.
Once bittern – Mrs Sciencebase’s first sighting, about 400m distant
We visited again today, quite a lot of avian activity: Cormorant, Great White Egret, Mute Swan, various ducks and other waterfowl, Snipe (6x), Marsh Harrier (3x), Kestrel (2x), Reed Bunting, Whitethroat, Reed Warbler, Blue Tit, Common Buzzard, Goldfinch (20x), Linnet (10x), Housemartins (24+) and various waders we could hear but didn’t see.
Great White Egret, about 400 metres distant, calling
Highlight for Mrs Sciencebase was her spotting a Bittern, this is the first time she’s ticked that particular heron, I believe, and was quite pleased to have finally seen one, having heard the males calling several times over the years at this and other places. As with that other heron, the egret, there are several obvious puns to be made, which I’ve done to death over the years. I have no egrets and remember once bittern…etc…
Meanwhile, it’s almost the end of August, temperature has been dropping, winds and rain picking up, and yet still seeing swallows, warblers, housemartins, and even an occasional swift that haven’t yet headed south for the winter. And, of course, there are still Osprey chicks at Rutland Water as I reported last week.
Cinnabar – named for the red colour of the mineral mercury sulfideMother of Pearl – resembling the natural composite material nacre. There are lots of “pearls”Silver Y – metallic and migratoryBrassy Longhorn – its wings have a metallic sheenBurnished Brass – resembles a glistening chunk of scorched alloyIron Prominent – patina not unlike the colour and timbre of rusty metalCopper Underwing – copper-coloured hindwingsBrimstone – named for the alchemists’ name for yellow sulfurRuby Tiger – tiger moth named for the red aluminium oxide gemGreen Silver-lines – Green moth with silver lines. There are other “silver” mothsMarbled Minor – Not quite a calcium carbonate moth. Lots of “marbles” and “marbled” mothsLight Emerald – another gem, lots of “emeralds”Gold Spot – a moth with spots of goldGold Triangle – At rest, it adopts a triangular posture
What could be more natural more evocative, more quintessentially English than a wildflower meadow nestled in the countryside, teeming with bees and butterflies, day-flying moths and countless other pollinators perhaps home to some ground-nesting birds and dozens of tiny mammals, a complete ecosystem when coupled with the natural reservoir in the neighbouring field?
And your wilding projects? Often the packs of seeds we scatter in our gardens to create a wild area or on roadside versions are cultivated mixes of cornflower, ox eye daisy, borage, (bizarrely) California poppy, and a few others. That said, I’ve tried to grow something more naturalistic by seeding corn cockle among the cornflowers, no ox eyes, but plenty of borage, viper’s bugloss, wild marjoram, opium poppies, yarrow, mallow, and the erroneously maligned ragwort.*
Well, sorry, but no. Not much of its not natural, it may be beautiful and conjure up images of a sadly lost past that never really existed, but many of what we call native wildflowers are anything but. Established wildflower meadows may well have taken hundreds of years to become established ecosystems. But, they arrived with humans who brought their agriculture from the Middle East in the stone age. Many of the species we consider essential to stocking a wildflower meadow are native to North Africa and the Mediterranean. They never grew here until the arrival of cultivated grassy food crops just a few millennia since.
Of course, many species in many different countries are not native, there have been so many changes to the climate and the geography and geology of the world over millions of years. What’s a few millennia between friends? Let’s cultivate the wildness anyway…
All of that said, it’s better to wild than to cultivate. Moreover, there is an argument that even if some of the so-called native wildflowers arrived with agriculture from the Middle East who’s to say that some of them weren’t growing here before the last ice age when the British mainland was conjoined to the European continent and the footprint of the landmass and the geography of the present Middle East were all very different?
*Ragwort: Erroneously maligned as a livestock and horse killer. Yes, it is toxic to cattle and horses and other animals and it’s sensible not to let it grow on pasture. However, it’s only a problem if the animals are not getting fed properly. It’s got a really bitter taste and most animals (Cinnabar moth larvae aside) will avoid it. However, it can end up in sileage when its bitterness might be masked by other plants in the mix and the animals quite happily tuck in and suffer.
