Biology – Page 8 – David Bradley

Hopping to the island of Menorca

We took a quick and easy flight to Menorca with an offsetting airline, first visit there since 2000 and first flight since our trip to Greece in the autumn before COVID…

the-sciencebases

Anyway, we half-planned a lazy week of traditional sun, sea, and sand, and maybe some sangria. Temperatures were high – well into the 30s – the sky was blue and clear every day and at dusk full of Common Swifts, and at least one or two Alpine Swifts as well as quartering Booted Eagles.

Swallowtail nectaring on Lantana camara (American plant species) — Swallowtail nectaring on Lantana camara

We spent some time by the pool, but the town of Cala’n Porter which overlooks a beautiful bay and is backed by a marshy gorge was irresistible in terms of hiking. Our first trek was pre-breakfast on the first morning after we arrived.

It was already almost 30 degrees before we’d reached the turning point to head back in time for breakfast. There were numerous Pied Flycatchers catching…flies…endless Cetti’s Warbler calling from the reeds, a Red-backed Shrike or two, and possibly a Black Redstart.

Dave Swimming Llucalari, photo by Tricia — Cala Llucalari

Post-breakfast, I took a closer look at the large patch of bougainvillea opposite our hotel and spotted numerous insects nectaring, various wasps and flies, several Hummingbird Hawk-moth, two or three Swallowtail butterflies, a couple of Cleopatra, a Clouded Yellow, and a possible, but unlikely, Two-tail Pasha, Southern Blue(?). I managed to grab photos and video snippets of one or two of those with an old Lumix bridge camera.

Cleopatra butterfly nectaring on Bougainvillea

Second morning was a repeat trek, but the following day we headed further East and up into the clifftop garrigue (bushy scrub) in the hope of seeing, or at least hearing, a Hoopoe, Upupa epops. We were out of luck on that sighting for the whole week. Any boop-boop-boop call would’ve been drowned out by the cicadas in the pines, anyway. We were loaded up on water and got as far as we could go on this walk, the clifftop overlooking Playa de Cales Coves (8km round trip). The rocky cove is, we would learn later, more readily accessible, and ultimately swimmable, if you hike in along the Cami de Cavalls bridleway from our base in Cala’n Porter.

We turned back after watching and listening to several Booted Eagles over the cliffs and saw skittering lizards and hopping grasshoppers and crickets, some looking ruby red in flight (I’m assuming it’s the Red-winged Grasshopper Oedipoda germanica), another insect almost the size of a small bird (Egyptian Grasshopper, I think) but largely brown dashed about while we rehydrated along the clifftop. We inadvertently detoured a little too much heading back but eventually found our way back to the edge of Cala’n Porter and an astroturf sportsfield overlooked by a telecommunications tower. It was only another 20 minutes back to the hotel pool and we had the dregs of the water to just make it.

The next expedition was westward. We started along the edge of the Cala’n Porter marsh heading in the direction of Cala Llucalari and Son Bou beyond that. We didn’t expect to get as far as Llucalari, it would seem like a long (18.6km there and back), trek in the heat more suited to undertaking on horseback given the rocky terrain and the ups and downs. On the way, we spotted Large Copper and the southern races of Meadow Brown and Speckled Wood butterflies as well as a species that has been ubiquitous in England during the summer of 2023, Red Admiral.

Mediterranean subspecies of Speckled Wood — Mediterranean Speckled Wood

Looking back while heading for Llucalari

Regardless of the terrain, we kept going and we espied the Mediterranean as we crowned a patch of “farmland” beyond some new olive groves being tended in the height of the heat. It was then downward to the rocky beach of Cala Llucalari.

Respectar la natura graffiti — Mrs Sciencebase admiring the “Respectar la Natura” graffiti

The beach was a sight for sore eyes but without beach shoes getting into the water was a little tough on bare feet but truly worth it once we were submerged. There were lots of Blue Rock Thrush darting about, Cleopatra butterflies, Small Copper, Large Copper, several of the aforementioned “blues”, as well as Scarce Bordered Straw, Silver Y, and Palpita Vitrealis moths. Highlight has to have been sighting of a pair of Egyptian Vultures, which circled overhead while we were swimming. I managed to get back to the shore and grab my camera for a snapshot just as they disappeared over the cliffs. A Lesser Kestrel came over minutes later.

A school of kayaks — Looking over the cliffs at a school of kayaks

The hike back from Llucalari back to Cala’n Porter was hard work, hot and tough on the back and ankles, but we made it in reasonable time to grab our evening meal. We decided to have the next day off from walking and the risk heatstroke.

Our next adventure/expedition was to take the “correct” footpath to Caya de Cales Coves, the Cami de Cavalls. We headed up and out of Cala’n Porter to the aforementioned sportsfield where we discovered that post number 1 on Stage 17 of the Cami is right there. It was a mere fifty-minute hike (6km there and back) to the beach via several lizards and a tortoise, The cove is flanked by natural and manmade caves that were used as a necropolis at least as long ago as 1500 BCE. It’s a beautiful beach, a kayak and yachting target, so a little bit busier than Llucalari, but we found a spot to swim from and to watch the Booted Eagles once again soaring above the clifftops. There was a flash of Kingfisher blue that darted through a rocky arch on the shoreline and almost collided with me before veering off across the water. We headed back after that for more…you guessed it…more pool time.

calas-coves-boats — Yachts at Cales Coves

I should, at this stage, point out that afternoon pooltime usually involved a bit of swimming, at least a couple of cervezas as well as an occasional survey of that bougainvillea opposite the hotel. The cervezas and the hummers kept coming, but there was no second sighting of Swallowtails sadly.

Evening entertainment was provided by the setting sun over the clifftop opposite our hotel balcony, the waxing moon, an evening meal at the hotel and an occasional foray into the relatively quiet bar and restaurant area of Cala’n Porter to take in some of the “interesting” musical artists. These included a “singer” called Niko (Megastars), who was by turns Elvis, Tina, and Freddie and on our last night ABBA Seagull who definitely did that band’s repertoire justice with just enough finesse and plenty of tongue-in-cheek. Acts back at the hotel included a solo singer with a stetson who strangled The Eagles and murdered Merle Haggard and Afrodiviac who enraptured at least one youngster staying at the hotel with her Gloria Gaynor.

It spat with rain towards the end of ABBA’s performance and the forecast for Sunday was looking cloudy, potentially very wet, and with a serious risk of flight-delaying lightning. We packed up and headed for our last breakfast in the hotel, no more Spanish omelette, but plenty of fuet sausage to send us on our way.

There seemed to have been something of an irruption of Pine Processionary moth in the hotel corridors, perhaps driven in by the change in the weather. There were various others hanging around too (Rush Veneer, Light Brown Apple Moth, Small Dusty Wave, Rusty Oak/Birch Button), and a roosting Hummingbird Hawk-moth. Our final morning awaiting transport was thus a bit of an ad hoc mothing expedition around the hotel lobby. There was always the tiniest of chances of spotting something big and squeaky, but no such luck.

Hotel-Playa-Azul-at-Night — Hotel Playa Azul by night

The weather seriously broke as we sat at the airport, not sure we’ve ever experienced such bad turbulence before take-off. Thankfully, our departure was only delayed by a couple of hours. There was genuine turbulence at 36000 feet, but nothing too exotic. Landing, security, baggage reclaim, customs, and back to the car park were smooth. We were home not seven hours after the morning’s nothing. As the sun went down Mrs Sciencebase and myself were musing on whether to start packing for our next trip…

Cala'n Porter cliff bar - Cova d'en Xoroi — Superzoom view of Cala’n Porter cliff bar – Club Menorca

Our first view of Cales Coves from the clifftop hike! — Cales Coves from the clifftop…no way down

Hummingbird Hawk-moth

Cala'n Porter Lumix Zoom

Superzoom view of hilltop villas, Cala’n Porter

balcony-view-arrival — Our balcony view of Playa de Cala’n Porter

hotel-from-beach — View of the hotel from the beach

morning-glory — What’s the story, Morning Glory?

waymarkers

Calan Porter Gorge — The Cala’n Porter Gorge – apple and pear orchards

Southern Common Blue, Polyommatus celina

Egyptian Grasshopper/Locust, Anacridium aegyptium

Biker Blinds in the gorge — Biker Blinds

Record shot: Egyptian Vulture — Egyptian Vulture (One of two over Llucalari)

Cotton Bollworm moth, known as Scarce Bordered Straw in the UK where it is a rare migrant

Mrs and Mr Sciencebase

Composite image of Booted Eagle and Menorcan Sunset — Menorcan Sunset

Photos with the white, skew dB/ logo were taken on my phone. The ones with my “proper” dB/ logo were taken on a Lumix DC-FZ82, which I originally bought for that Greek trip but never used. Those with the tricia logo were taken by Mrs Sciencebase on her phone.

One of the tiniest moths I’ve ever seen

I was tidying up the mothing equipment, which is basically a box and egg cartons when I noticed a Least Carpet roosting on a window frame in the conservatory, I stepped up with a pot to catch it so I could release it into the back garden but spotted another tiny moth next to it. At this point, I wasn’t even sure it was a moth. It looked orange with what seemed to be white stripes. I grabbed a quick phone macro shot, before potting it.

It wasn’t a species I’d noticed or recorded before, but the ObsIdentify app ticked it as the Horse-chestnut Leafminer, Cameraria ohridella. This was confirmed by a quick look at the species page on UK Moths. LabLit on twitter has now told me that the moth’s species name “ohridella” is named for Lake Ohrid in Macedonia.

I set up my macro “studio” and got some closeups of the moth against a matte white background, once it would sit still for more than a second or two. The moth is a mere 4 millimetres, I’d say, thank goodness for macro lenses and extension tubes.

Horse Chestnut Leaf-miner, Cameraria ohridella [Deschka & Dimic, 1986]. Shiny scales reflecting macro "studio" LED lighting — Horse Chestnut Leafminer, 4mm long

As the moth’s name would suggest, the tiny larvae of this moth species, grow inside leaves of the Horse Chestnut tree, nibbling their way around the interior of the leaf and forming what are referred to as leaf mines. An infestation of this moth can ravage a tree leaving its leaves brown and withered at the end of summer and giving the appearance of imminent death in the tree. Thankfully, the damage done by the leafminers, while more than cosmetic, does not seem to harm the Horse Chestnuts. They lose their leaves in the autumn, as all deciduous trees are wont to do. Incidentally, the UK Moths site points out that a fungal infection has a similar effect on the appearance of the leaves of this tree.

Horse Chestnut Leaf-miner moth in its unusual head-down, tail-up posture — The moth in its characteristic head-down, tail-up posture

The moth species was first recorded in Macedonia in 1985 and took just 15 or 16 years to reach the UK. It was recorded in Wimbledon in 2002 but was abundant so may have arrived just after the eponymous tennis tournament the year before. First seen in my village of Cottenham in 2004 and recorded by a fellow mothing friend at the other end of the village in 2022. I may well have seen it last year without realising, of course.

UPDATE: 27 July 2023, we camped under a Horse Chestnut at Cherry Hinton Hall for the Cambridge Folk Festival. The tree was covered in larvae and lots of adults flying about.

Mothematics – Some moth stats

UPDATE: 15th October 2024 – Seven summers of lighting up! If you’re a regular here, you may well recall how my mothing journey all started. Meanwhile, I’ve even done an extensive mothing glossary for the community for newbies and experts.

I have recorded 516 different species of moth in my garden as of 15th October 2024. 51 species elsewhere. I have photographs of most of those species, with the exception of the marvellous Hornet Clearwing moth which I saw (drawn to a pheromone lure) but didn’t net. I have also seen and recorded 44 other species on campsites, nature reserves and in holiday house gardens (New Forest, Dorset, Anglesey, and at Chippenham Fen and Les King Wood).

My first season began late, 24th July 2018 and I didn’t keep full logs, but saw roughly 127 species of moth, most of which I’d never even noticed nor photographed before.

In 2019 I ran 272 sessions with a 40W Robinson trap and recorded 12373 moths of 315 species 125 of those were new to me. That represents 45 s/s avg, specimens trapped (and released) per session on average.

In 2020, COVID-19 lockdown year, I ran 294 sessions and had 8529 moths of 309 species, 30 of those species were new to me, and that’s a per session average of 30 s/s avg. Way down on 2019.

2021 – 288 sessions, 7608 moths of 278 species – 38 NFM – 38 s/s avg

In 2022 – 244 sessions, 7900 moths of 321 species – 64 NFM – 32 s/s avg last NFM of the year was the much hoped for December Moth, which arrived at the end of October.

24th October 2023 – 197 sessions, counted 8086 moths of 334 species so far – 44 NFG as of 24th Oct – 45 s/s avg. I switched to a Skinner trap with a 20W Wemlite from my old 40W Robinson trap, in early June 2023.

15th October – 212 sessions, 6025 moths of 334 species. Mostly with the Skinner, occasionally the old Robinson, sometimes with the LepiLED.

If I just select out the peak season 1st of May to 30 September, things are slightly different in terms of per-session averages:

2024 – 5700 specimens over 143 sessions – 40 s/s – 334 species

2023 – 7551 specimens over 116 sessions – 65 s/s – 330 species

2022 – 7253 specimens over 130 sessions – 56 s/s – 321 species

2021 – 7194 specimens over 141 sessions – 51 s/s – 278 species

2020 – 8002 specimens over 137 sessions – 58 s/s – 309 species

2019 – 10966 over 128 sessions – 86 s/s – 315 species

Obviously, 2019 was an interesting year, my first full season and I seemed to get large numbers of moths and quite good diversity appearing in the trap during almost every lighting-up session. Things were not so good the next summer, with a drop from almost 90 per session to just under 60, but we’d had a warm and early spring with cold snaps at night. 2021 was not like 2020 in terms of how the seasons panned out and I saw another drop in per session average to just over 50. 2022 was half way back up between the 2020 and 2021 averages. 2023 has been quite bizarre, numbers seemed to be way down early in the season, but diversity and numbers picked up. I was also more aware of various micro moths and so my new-for-garden (NFG) was 44, with a few new macros, like Leopard Moth, but not the NFG numbers of my earlier years, obviously.

I expect to see similar total numbers and diversity next year, but perhaps with fewer NFGs, but who knows, it’s rather unpredictable.

Butterflies sleeping in the garden

UPDATE: They’re still at it, night of 23 Jul, three Holly Blue, two Red Admiral, and a Gatekeeper roosting in the ivy.

A few days ago, I noticed a Holly Blue on a plant stem on the lawn at dusk. Actually, there have been hundreds of this species in the garden this year. But, this one was settled, it was at roost, in its nocturnal torpor state.

Asleep, in other words.

Holly Blue at roost in the middle of the lawn

I put a metal basket over the top of it so that nobody would tread on it if they were mothing around the garden (me) or counting frogs (son). Once it got properly dark, I took a short stroll around the garden (the only thing possible with a short garden) and shone a torch up at the overhanging ivy, ostensibly I was looking for moths, but there was another Holly Blue roosting under an ivy leaf. Down below roosting on some apple mint, a Green-veined White.

Inspired, I plodded around the rest of the garden peering under bushes and around the potting shed expectantly and was rewards with a Small Tortoiseshell, a Red Admiral, and a European Peacock, all asleep in different spots in the garden.

It was an odd revelation, I’ve been mothing for six summers now and have seen lots of moths flying around the garden, nectaring on the wildflowers and the (un)cultivated flowers, and of course, a lot drawn to the UV light…but I’d never noticed roosting butterflies before.

Has something changed or is it just my level of observation? Last year was particularly hot and dry, it’s likely that lots of gardens, hedgerows, and bushes and wild plants out in the nearby countryside died. Of course, there’s also the issue of the two new housing estates being built not half a mile from us on old farmland. That could have removed their usual nocturnal roosting spots forcing the ones that survived the upheaval to spend the night in our garden.

Small Tortoiseshell asleep in the potting shed, hanging from the ceiling, photo inverted — Small Tortoiseshell asleep in the potting shed

I usually do a couple of Big Butterfly Counts for the UK’s conservation agency, along with millions of other people, hashtag #CitizenScience. When it was sunny earlier in the week, I counted 30 Holly Blues during the 15-minute recording period as well as loads of Large and Small Whites. The Comma, Marbled Brown, Gatekeeper, Red Admiral, Small Tortoiseshell, and European Peacock, all stayed away until just after the time was up! I’ve not seen a Marbled White in the garden this year, yet, nor Common Blue, they less commonly seen around here, but they the former has been on the outskirts of the village in numbers. There are dozens of Red Admirals around at the moment.

Anyway, I will survey the garden again and see what other strange bedfellows are sleeping among the campion and toadflax.

I asked the question on one of the mothing groups and one respondent suggested that butterflies roosting in one’s garden is perfectly normal. I’m sure it is, just not seen it before in our small garden.

A bridge camera for troubled authors

Back in August 2019, before our last trip abroad (a wildlife and yoga holiday organised and run by friends), I bought a bridge camera. Much lighter in the luggage and easier to handle when trekking about in the Greek heat.

Well, that was the plan. In the end, I couldn’t bear not having a decent camera and lens for all the birds – Eleanora’s Falcon, Bee-eater, Sardinian Warbler, Blue Rock Thrush, Red-rumped Swallow, Lesser Kestrel, Honey Buzzard, Black Stork, and many others. So, I took my old Canon 6D and the Sigma 150-600mm. I wouldn’t have realistically got the shots I did even with the so-called 60x zoom of the bridge camera I’d bought – Panasonic Lumix DC-FZ82. That 60x zoom means it goes from the 35mm-frame equivalent of a very wide 20mm to a superzoom of 1200mm, on its tiny sensor. The purchase was at the time a mistake; the camera has languished in a cupboard unused and unloved ever since to my chagrin.

However, something changed in the air this summer and I thought I’d dig out the camera again to do some experiments. What had changed? Well, the wind picked up and the overnight temperatures dropped meaning that moth diversity and numbers in the garden have plummeted in the last few days . So, apart from a couple of micros, I’ve not really had any new species to photograph in my macro studio with dSLR setup (Canon 7Dii and Tamron 90mm 1:1 macro lens). The most exciting moths in the trap* last night were a couple of Box-tree moths, the very familiar grass veneers, a solitary Scalloped Oak, and just one Large Broad-bordered Yellow Underwing (LBBYU).

I thought I’d dig out the Lumix and see how it fared with macro photography on these two specimens. Obviously, I have half-decent photos of both of those with my dSLR macro kit from previous seasons. The macro mode on the Lumix is pretty good, it lets you get to within 10mm or so of the subject. Obviously, that was too close to get the whole of the Scalloped Oak, perched on a matching chunk of wood, in the frame. But, I took a few shots anyway. They were okay. The quality of the basic single-frame shots doesn’t really match my dSLR setup but the focus stacking feature is handy and I gave that a try with the Scalloped Oak. To be honest, it works, but the image quality isn’t as good as the macro function on my phone.

Focus stacked image of Scalloped Oak moth using Lumix

Scalloped Oak moth using Samsung A52s phone camera — Scalloped Oak moth using Samsung A52s

I then turned to another perhaps more useful feature I’d remembered on the Lumix – recording a 4K snippet of video from which you can then pick the best single frame and save it as a 4K photo. Now, this is something that’s not available with old dSLRs like my Canon 7Dii or the older 6D.

In order to test this feature and see if I could get a decent shot of the LBBYU’s yellow-marked rear wings, I released the moth from its and let it fly up against my studio window. I’d set the camera EV to somewhere between +2 and +3 above neutral exposure to compensate for the bright background and then recorded a few of those 4K video snippets as the moth flapped vigourously around the window. Unfortunately, they’re just blurry and noisy and not worth showing. I have in the past got better shots using burst mode with a dSLR and using the same EV over-exposure trick.

I think I will take the camera on our next trip abroad as the scenic shots are pretty good and much better than what I get with my phone.

*Skinner trap with Welmite 20W ultraviolet compact fluorescent tube.

Cleaning up a Least Weasel with Firefly

While we were standing on the ditch-bridge beyond the old, stilted Rothschild’s Bungalow at Woodwalton Fen National Nature Reserve trying to catch a glimpse of the Purple Emperors wheeling high above is in the oak trees, a mammal squeaked near our feet and poked its head out to see what all the fuss was about. It was a Least Weasel, it seems.

Its scientific name is Mustela nivalis, although it is often known as the Little Weasel, Common Weasel, or in some places simply a Weasel. In the US the term weasel is more generic and applies to a whole range of creatures. Not to be confused with Mustela erminea,that’s stoatally different although not weasily distinguished. Hahahah.

Anyway, as is the wont of these small carnivores, they might pop out into the open, as did this one, before quickly disappearing back into the tangled undergrowth. But, they almost always come back out within a second or two for another look as did this one, before it plopped into the ditch water swam the few feet across and could be heard scuffling on the other side before disappearing for good.

The upshot of all this peeking and scuffling is that I wasn’t quick enough to get the first shot of the creature standing on the bridge near our feet, but I got a sneaky shot of her after she made her second appearance. Unfortunately, there was a blade of blurry green grass right in front of her. I found a Photoshop tutorial on how to remove such distractions, but the techniques didn’t translate easily to PaintShopPro, although I had a go and managed to decolourise the blade so it was brown and slightly less distracting than the green.

I posted the image on Twitter to confirm the species but also to ask if anyone knew of a simple way to remove blurry blades of grass. Various people replied with PhotoShop suggesttions. But, like I say, I use PaintShopPro rather than that pricey Adobe subscription product. Twitter friend Chuck Baggett offered the best solution. A free, beta-testing AI tool from the very same Adobe, known as Firefly. It’s a generative art tool akin to Dall-E and MidJourney, AI apps I’ve discussed at length here previously.

Firefly has an object removal tool within its repertoire. You set an appropriate brush and simply paint over the object you want to remove. Chuck did the job for me on the version of the weasel, I’d tweeted. But, I obviously wanted to test the app myself, so I uploaded a JPG rendering of the DNG output I’d created with DxO PureRaw3 from the original camera RAW file. Set a brush up and painted out the green blade of grass and some of the other distracting fronds. There were some odd artefacts visible when viewing the eye close-up, but they were relatively easy to fix in PaintShopPro without having to start from scratch in the Firefly AI app.

Least Weasel photo before and after Firefly retouching

I can highly recommend Adobe Firefly for removing such problems from your photos. Much quicker and easier than the various approaches offered for PhotoShop. The app adds a watermark that declares the image was generated with an AI app, but I think in this case it’s quite fair of me to crop out that declaration given then I was simply manipulating my own photo with a digital brush! Obviously, the Firefly system can generate artwork from text descriptions just as Dall-E and MidJourney do and those generative images probably should be declared as such in some circumstances.

A micro moth, relatively new to science

The rate at which I’m seeing new moth species in the garden has been somewhat slow this year. Obviously, in my first couple of years mothing, I saw dozens and dozens I’d never seen before. In fact, most of the moths I saw early on were all new to me. I think the garden list got to about 350 species after the first three years. In subsequent, years, I’d see double figures of new moths, at least 127 NFM in 2018, 125+ NFM in 2019, and so on. 2022 was a good year, 64 NFM with the last new one of the year being at the end of October, December Moth!

Anarsia innoxiella (Gregersen & Karsholt, 2017)

So far in 2023, I’ve seen 22 new species.

Interestingly, as I fill in my records and add photos of the moths to my galleries on Imaging Storm, I also note as part of the scientific name, the scientists who gave the species its official name. Most of these were done in the 18th and 19th centuries by Linnaeus, Hufnagel, Denis & Schiffermüller, Scopoli, Forster, and others. But, a new moth for me this morning was Anarsia innoxiella. This tiny micro moth was new to science in 2017, according to the UK Moths site. The species is, the site says, well-established but only in local spots in Southern England.

According to the site, “it is thought that most specimens of previously identified A. lineatella that have been light-trapped are likely to be innoxiella.” The site adds, “The long black streak in the centre of the forewing is said to be diagnostic of innoxiella, supported by the more contrasting pattern overall. A. lineatella has a less-contrasting, duller pattern and the central black streak is shorter and more elliptical.”

Stiffkey Spoonies and Trimingham Bee-eaters

We took our first camping trip to Stiffkey for several years. Torrential rain and wind during the first night, but better, brighter, hotter days to follow, mostly. Mrs Sciencebase had spotted Spoonbills at North Fen Stiffkey on Tuesday night before the rain, so we headed that way the next morning and discovered a flock of around 16 or 17. Grey day so not bright bird photos. There were also Cormorant and Avocet on the same patch.

The next day’s walk took us to Wells-next-Sea where there was another flock of 14 or so on land before you get to the sailing club etc.

Spoonbill in flight, showing breeding plumage

In between those two sightings, however, we had headed for the quarry at Trimingham further along the North Norfolk coast to see the nesting Bee-eaters. There are three there this year (there were eight last year, but not nesting success, as far as I know). One of this year’s three is apparently one of the same birds, a male, that was at this site in 2022.

Flying European Bee-eater — European Bee-eater in flight

Bee-eater departing the threesome's burrow at Trimingham — Bee-eater departing the threesome’s burrow at Trimingham

One of The Trimingham Three Bee-eaters heading for their burrow

Meanwhile, it’s always worth checking the utility blocks on a campsite for moths and I was pleased to see two species there that I’d not recorded before – Beautiful China-mark and Marbled Brown. Also, lots of Garden Grass-veneer, a Riband Wave, a Common Yellow Conch, and various other micros.

Beautiful China-mark washing-up block, High Sand Creek, Stiffkey — Beautiful China-mark

Interesting to learn that the campsite manager has also been turned to the mothside and was interested to know what I’d spotted and to show me some of her utility-block snaps. Apparently, one camping guest brings a trap and was hoping to snap up some rarities off the tidal marsh.

Marbled Brown moth roosting in campsite toilet block — Marbled Brown

Last camping night, we also noticed an ironically uncommon sight, a Common Gull. It was hunting for crumbs and scraps with a solitary Pied Wagtail, numerous Wood Pigeon, and several Jackdaw.

With plans to visit Holt Country Park on the way home to potentially see Silver-washed Fritillary, White Admiral and perhaps Purple Emperor, it was a surprise to catch sight of a White Admiral flying low across the campsite as we decamped. We saw lots of SWFs and five or six White Admiral at the Country Park, but no Emperors, sadly.

White Admiral butterfly high up in a tree at Holt CountryPark — White Admiral

Boosting a shady Scarlet Tiger moth

I visited Chippenham Fen NNR. Hoping to see Purple Emperor and seeing a solitary White Admiral instead. Also saw the nationally rare, fenland Silver-barred moth, and lots of Scarlet Tiger moths. It was a grey day by the time I got a snap of a Scarlet Tiger nectaring (one of the only moths of this group in the UK that can feed as an adult). Of course, being a grey day, the light levels were low below a bank of trees with the favoured thistles.

High ISO (2500) photo processed with DxO PureRaw3 removes noise to equivalent of ISO 320 — DxO PureRaw3 can save you three full ISO stops of noise

As you can see from the left-hand portion of this photo, there was a lot of noise in the image. I used DxO PureRaw 3 (right-hand portion processed with the DeepPrimeXD AI setting) to cut the noise and do a little bit of sharpening to the image and then PaintShop Pro to adjust levels in this split-screen shot.

The photo was taken from about 3 metres away, closest I can get with that my big zoom lens, a Sigma OS 150-600mm lens fully extended on a Canon 7D mark ii. And, cropped from a pixel-width of 5472 to just the moth and some of the thistle, which gave me a 1590-pixel wide image, fine for the web and social media.

Camera settings used were shutterspeed 1/800s, f/6.3, and ISO 2500. I reckon PureRaw3 saves you about three full stops of ISO. So, the cleanup of this photo at ISO 2500 is giving you an image equivalent to what I would have got if I’d been able to get a correct exposure at ISO 320.

However, I felt that although the DxO AI software had done an incredible job on removing noise, as it always does, the photo could do with a different type of additional sharpening. So, I fed the original output from DxO into Topaz SharpenAI and then did my usual PaintShopPro tweaks on the saved filed from that software to get what I think is an even better final photo.

Topaz, DxO, PSP processed Scarlet Tiger — This Scarlet Tiger scrubbed up quite well with some RAW processing

Chippenham Fen National Nature Reserve

Having spent Saturday morning with the Coton Orchard mothing team, I missed out on a Butterfly Conservation mothing and butterflying event at Chippenham Fen NNR, which overlapped. So, I headed up to the Fen on the Sunday morning.

I spent a couple of hours there after a horrendous number of detours to find the place. Once on the site, I spotted lots of very flitty and active Ringlet butterflies, numerous Skippers, and a single White Admiral high overhead. Unfortunately, didn’t see any Purple Emperor butterflies, which had been my primary target.

I hadn’t realised that this Fen is a site for Scarlet Tiger moth of which there were lots. Also spotted the fairly common Yellow Shell moth, a couple of un-ID micros, and I did catch a very fleeting glimpse of the Fen’s signature Lepidopteral species, the incredibly rare and fenland-only Silver-barred moth, which was one of the mothing targets for the group there yesterday.

And another nice sighting – juvenile Great Spotted Woodpecker (red underparts and size separate it from the much rarer Lesser Spotted).