Not a bad week. Moth trap has been reasonably busy compared with previous weeks. Quite a lot of new species - mostly geometrids.
19/5/12 - 16 of 10 species including my first Small White and Riband Waves and a Heart and Dart
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| Wave sp. (see comments below) |
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| Heart and Dart |
20/5/12 - 18 of 6 species including 12 Treble Lines, Shuttle-shaped Dart and Flame Carpet
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| Treble Lines - 70% of my catch! |
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| Monster Cockchafer |
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| Shuttle-shaped Dart |
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| Flame Carpet |
A few other bits and pieces: A Wembury tick in the form of Sedge Warbler thanks to warbler finder extraordinaire Andy; a pregnant? Common Lizard and some very late first
Bombus pascuorum.
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| Bumpy enough to be pregnant? |
Hi Rich,
ReplyDeleteHope you don't mind a quick correction. Your wave is a Common Wave (Cabera exanthemata), not Small White Wave.
Nice blog by the way.
Douglas.
Corrections are actively encouraged! My ID of that was largely on size, it was pretty small. If, as I think, the illustrations in Townsend are life size, it matched well with Small White Wave. I caught another last night and it can have only been 1.5 - 2 cm ws.
ReplyDeleteRich
Hi Rich,
ReplyDeleteJust had look at your image, enlarged it this time; my last look was clearly too brief. It's not Common Wave, sorry!
These group are pretty tricky, I can be sure it's not Small WW though. It could well be Smoky Wave (what sort of habitat do you have there, it's a heathland species if I remember rightly? Feeds on heather I think?)
See images of both speices here:
http://www.lepiforum.de/cgi-bin/lepiwiki.pl?Scopula_Ternata
http://www.lepiforum.de/cgi-bin/lepiwiki.pl?Scopula_Floslactata
Douglas.
It's a rural garden within a mile of the sea on the south Devon coast. Backs on to arable land (livestock and wheat/rape) with a little oak and pine woodland nearby. 10 miles or more from any heather or bilberry (the other food plant of Smoky apparently). I'm not sure that the photo really does the moth justice, it was a bit more clearly marked than the photo would suggest.
ReplyDeleteHi Rich,
ReplyDeleteThanks for that infomation. Certainly not Smoky then. Nice part of the world, you get some good moths, not found up here.
It's definitely not Small White Wave, the wing shape is wrong as well as the cross lines and lack of discal spot.
I'm pretty sure it's Cream Wave (think I inadvertently added link above), but this is big, why I wasn't sure before. Perhaps yours was just a very small individual.
Cheers,
Douglas.