Twenty-plume moth and honeysuckle

 

Fragrant honeysuckle Lonicera periclymenum that grows in our garden hedge provides nectar for moths in summer ……

…. berries for birds in autumn …

…. and a breeding site for this exquisite little twenty-plume moth Alucita hexadactyla, which has wings composed of tiny plumes that resemble feathers. It lays its eggs in honeysuckle leaves and flower buds. Plume moths fly at dusk and are strongly attracted to lit windows; I found this one, with a wingspan of about a centimeter, settled on our living room wall.

The common name is a misnomer because each of the four wings has six plumes, so it should really be the twenty-four-plume moth, but the scientific name is accurate: hexadactyla means six fingers.

Flying chimney sweepers

 There were scores of these little chimney sweeper Odezia atrata moths flying in the sunlight in the hay meadow in Durham University Botanic Garden this morning. It seemed as though there had been a recent mass emergence, since they were all in mint condition, with the white tips to their sooty-black wings intact.

Their larvae feed on the flowers of pignut, the white umbellifer growing amongst the hay rattle in the photo below.

The meadow has a sheltered, southerly-facing aspect, perfect for this little day-flying moth that only produces one generation, in early summer, each year.

Pale tussock moth caterpillar Calliteara pudibunda

 

We found this larva of a pale tussock moth crawling along the parapet of Prebends bridge, across the river Wear, in Durham.

Everything about it warned ‘don’t touch me’. It would present a challenge for most insectivorous birds, although cuckoos, with a gizzard that can cope with irritating hairs, sometimes eat them. Those deterrents inflict discomfort on tender human flesh too; finely barbed and filled with irritating fluid, they can cause dermatitis. Calliteara pudibunda was once a notorious pest of hop fields, which might explain naturalist Gilbert White’s journal entry for October 8th. 1781, noting that  ‘ …women and children have eruptions on their hands ….after they have been employed in hop picking’.  More recently, families from London’s East End, travelling to Kent for traditional hop picking work every autumn, would have been painfully familiar with these caterpillars, that they knew as ‘hop dogs’.

Pale tussock larvae are not picky about food plants and defoliate at least a dozen broadleaved tree species, including beech, hawthorn, sycamore and lime, all well represented along this riverbank. But, out of curiosity, I offered our captive some young shoots from the hop vine that twines through our garden fence. It had a nibble but was fully fed and only interested in finding somewhere dry and secure amongst the leaf litter, where it will pupate inside a cocoon woven from recycled defensive bristles.

Hatched from an egg laid last June, this wanderer - provided it hasn’t already been parasitised by an ichneumon wasp - should survive winter, metamorphosing as a beautiful pale grey moth next spring.

Bramble leaf miner

Almost a work of abstract art - last year's leaf mines of the bramble leaf miner moth Stigmella aurella in an old bramble leaf. It looks like there were two miners in this one,  with their feeding tunnels becoming increasingly broad as the larvae grew.

 

Alder moth caterpillar: a blast from the past

 It is almost exactly 50 years since I last found one of these: an alder moth caterpillar. Then, I was living in Warwickshire and it was curled up on a leaf, just as this latest one was, in a hedgerow in County Durham.

I have migrated north but so has Acronicta alni, except that it has extended its range more slowly. A  thorough guide to moths in County Durham published in 1986 doesn't list it, but now the alder moth is here, another insect species extending its range northwards, most likely in response to climate change. 

heather moorland in August

 The moorlands of Weardale are a sea of purple heather at the moment, often stretching all the way to the horizon. Billions of tiny, nectar-rich flowers are in bloom, feeding vast numbers of insects, from minute thrips to butterflies.

The flowering of the heather coincides with the breeding season of these heather Colletes bees (Colletes succinctus), below. They lay their eggs in tunnels excavated in the sandy moorland soil, usually on a south facing patch of bare ground, then provision the egg with heather pollen before sealing the chamber. They're solitary bees, unlike the highly organised, social nests of honeybees and bumblebees, but do aggregate their nests in huge colonies. Yesterday we must have walked past many thousands of them, congregating at the entrance to their tunnels and shuttling backwards and forwards to the heather flowers.

The vast expanse of flowers also attracts butterflies. Yesterday we saw red admirals, small coppers, small tortoiseshells and small heaths. The small coppers breed on dense, transient patches of sorrel that grows quickly on the bare soil after a heather burn.

This 'woolly bear' caterpillar (below) is the larva of the northern race of the oak eggar moth Lasiocampa quercus. It spends two years in the larval stage, overwintering as a larva before emerging to feed again, then pupating over a second winter before it finally emerges as a spectacular moth.

And finally, a rove beetle Platydracus stercorarius, with wings tightly folded under those red wing cases

Small ermine moth

Small ermine moths usually feed on bird cherry leaves, hereabouts, enclosing whole shoots and even branches in a silken tent, so they can feed safely inside

For the last two years they have fed on spindle bushes in my garden. Spindle Euonymus europaeus is a native hedgerow small tree in Britain, but is rare in the wild here in North East England. It is often grown in gardens, for its attractive seed capsules and vibrant autumn colour.

When the caterpillars are fully fed they crawl down to ground level and spin a silken cocoon on the ground, where they pupate.

They started hatching in my garden in the third week of July.

And here is the newly emerged moth, clad in copy of the ermine trimmed robes worn by their Lordships in the House of Lords.

Campion moth caterpillar

This is a red campion seed capsule full of ripe seeds and .....

... this face peering out of a ripe seed capsule is the caterpillar of the campion moth Sideridis rivularis, which has eaten all the seeds

When they are small the caterpillars can eat the seeds from within, but as they grow that can be a bit of a squeeze, so ....

... they start again, working from the outside.


Photographed at Egglestone in Teesdale, North Pennines

Newly-minted large yellow underwing moth

We found this large yellow underwing moth Noctua pronuba crawling across a pavement just after it had hatched from its pupal case. At that point the wings were very small - about one third of the length of the body - but by the time I'd carried it home, after half an hour later, they had almost fully expanded.

It sat on a leaf holding its wings vertical above its back for the final stages in their development, revealing the bright yellow underwings and also ....

... this small bristle on the underwide of the lower wing, which seems to lock into a slot on the underside of the upper wing - presumably a mechanism for holding them together in flight to produce a larger, more rigid wing surface.

Here the wings are about 90% expanded and you can see the yellow 'flash coloration' that is thought to alarm and deter predators when they disturb the moth.

While it was extending its wings the moth also had a practice uncoiling of its proboscis.

Finally, here it is, fully winged and ready for flight. A dull-looking moth until you disturb it and it exposes those colourful underwings.

These moths are very vulnerable in the hours between their emergence and the final development of their wings - click here for images of one that was not so lucky....

Nettle tap moth Anthophila fabriciana

This is the bivouac of a nettle tap moth caterpillar Anthophila fabriciana, which builds itself a temporary home by folding a stinging nettle leaf and stitching it together with silken thread.

Stinging nettle food plants are ubiquitous and this must be one of our commonest micro-moths, It produces two broods a year and the adult day-flying moths (see below) sometimes appear in very large numbers. The earliest brood to emerge often feeds on cow parsley and hogweed umbels.

Vere Lucy Temple (1889-1981): a forgotten, gifted entomologist and illustrator

These very attractive plates are from a book called Butterflies and Moths of Britain, written and illustrated by Vere Lucy Temple and published in 1945. 

I bought a copy in a second-hand bookshop about fifty years ago and have always liked the way that the plates were drawn, with the coloured butterflies portrayed against line drawings of their food plants, usually with the larvae and pupae.

It's difficult to find much information about Temple, who was born in 1898 and is thought to have died in 1981. She specialised in natural history and animal painting and seems to have been in demand in the 1920s and 1930s, when she exhibited in leading galleries.

She wrote and illustrated seven books and illustrated five others. All her original work seems to have been auctioned in numerous lots after her death. On the strength of these attractive butterfly and moth illustrations, she deserves to be more widely known. 

Vere Lucy Temple was a Fellow of the Royal Entomology Society, which explains why the text of her book is so full of perceptive detail, but it's also a very lively, personal and engaging account that conveys her passion for butterflies. 

In her preface she acknowledges help and advice from several eminent lepidopterists and scientists of her day and also refers to what was, then, cutting-edge research on insect vision and behaviour.

Longhorn moths

Last week Mark Cocker wrote a fascinating Guardian Country Diary about the yellow-barred longhorn moth Nemophora degeerella  (click here to read his piece). 

By a lucky coincidence, when we visited my eldest son and his partner today their garden at Winlaton Mill near Blaydon was home to a small swarm of these little moths with amazingly long antennae. 

Part of the charm of these moths lies in their courtship 'dances' when they flutter, hover and weave from side to side waving this outsized antennae. It's the moth equivalent of Saturday Night Fever, or maybe a break-dancing contest. They put on a stunning performance this lunchtime - must try to capture it on video next time.