We had a successful night's moth trapping last night with our brand new moth trap - a portable Skinner trap, with a 15W actinic tube. This is a good upgrade from our previous 6W portable Heath trap and should produce much larger catches for us in the coming months. Here are some of the trap inhabitants from this morning....
A beautiful garden tiger, or Arctia caja. A species which has declined badly since the 1980's, they are still fortunately common at Langford. The larvae are the familiar 'wooly bears' that you may have encountered as a child and they feed on a wide range of herbaceous plants.
Peppered moth, Biston betularia, a member of the Geometridae family. They are the species that famously evolved a black form in industrial areas as camoflague against dark, sooty deposits on tree trunks. This is the normal form of the moth.
The sallow kitten, or Furcula furcula, is a lovely little species with two generations throughout much of the UK. The larval foodplants are usually various species of willow (Salix spp.), but they have also been reported from aspen and poplars (both Populus spp.).
And finally, not a moth, but a beetle....Nicrophorus humator to be exact. It is a member of the Family Silphidae, the burying beetles and is a fairly common species in much of England. They feed on carrion and are strongly attracted to light, hence their regular occurance in moth traps. The little moth in the foreground on the left is a middle-barred minor, Oligia fasciuncula.