Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
THERE WERE at least half a dozen Large Yellow Underwings in the moth trap this morning plus some of their smaller relatives but this is the first time that I’ve seen the Broad-bordered Yellow Underwing, Notcua fimbriata. This is a male; the female is paler.
It’s more typical of wooded areas than gardens but as the foodplants of its larvae include docks, nettles, brambles, sallows and willows it’s not surprising that it has turned up here.
Although it’s years since I last saw a Silver Y moth, Autographa gamma, I didn’t have any difficulty in putting a name to it, thanks to the conspicuous calligraphic Y on its wing. This is the first time that it has turned up in
the moth trap and that could be because, as an immigrant each year to Britain, it has taken until now to reach Yorkshire.
There are so many brownish, streaked little moths, both micro and macro, that I find drawing them gives me my best chance of picking out the pattern as I look through the field guide. Taking a close look at this, I noticed that the two bands and the inconspicuous dot made a pattern like a carnival mask, enabling me to identify it as the Dun-bar, Cosmia trapezina, a common moth from lowland Scotland southwards, wherever there are trees.
While I sketched these moths Barbara went through the book and came up with a name for this obscure-looking delta-winged little moth. It’s the Fan-foot, Zanclognatha tarsipennalis, a common moth of woods, hedges and gardens.
The the three lines on its wing are;
with a row of fine dashes along the edge of the wing.
Lets have an easier moth; the male of the Orange Swift, Hepialus sylvina, has a bright orange-brown forewing. It’s larvae feed on herbceous plants including dock, dandelion and bracken.
These two underwings are so regular in the moth trap that I tend to ignore them so that I thought it was about time that I made a quick sketch of them.
AT FIRST GLANCE you might think ‘butterfly’ as the Early Thorn, Selenia dentaria, is the only Thorn moth to hold its wings up in butterfly fashion.
You might be thinking that late July doesn’t qualify as ‘Early’ but this is a female of the second generation, which usually has a larger tawny orange patch on its underwing than the February to May generation.
As the name suggests, she might well be looking for a blackthorn or hawthorn to lay her eggs on, there are plenty in the immediate vicinity, but the larvae will also feed on birch, alder, honeysuckle, sallow or bog-myrtle. They’re common in a wide variety of habitats including gardens, hedges and woods so they should feel at home here.
THIS IS the moth trap that I’ve been using. It’s built from a design that you can find in the Anglian Lepidopterist Supplies Beginners Guide to Moth Trapping, which is available as a PDF from the Anglian Lepidopterist Supplies website. It slots together so it’s easy to dismantle for storage.
I bought the black light UV bulb in September, intending to have the trap ready for the moths of early autumn but by Christmas I still hadn’t made a start on it so I’m grateful to my friend David Stubbs of Solway Dory who made this for me in his workshop.
He made one modification to the design which isn’t essential but which I’ve found helpful; the original design is apparently open to the ground so he added a plywood base that rests on batons of 1×1 inch timber glued around the bottom edges of the trap. This is useful on a summer morning when I need to move the trap into the shade to deal with later.
A further improvement that I have in mind: I’m checking in charity shops to see if I can find a suitable heatproof glass container, such as a large cafetière, to cover the bulb so that if there’s a shower during the night it will be protected.
I didn’t want to run the cable out of a window so I had an outdoor electrical socket with a circuit breaker fitted on the back wall of the house, which is a useful thing to have anyway.
A couple of friends who’ve had experience of moth-trapping recommended that I start with a UV lamp rather than the more powerful mercury vapour. Apart from potentially annoying the neighbours in a back garden location like mine, the mercury vapour brings in so many moths from such a wide area that it can be daunting for the beginner to deal with quantity and variety of species caught.
My friend Tim Freed who does moth surveys sometimes runs three traps simultaneously but he stops up all night going from one to the other logging the catch.
I’m happier to be dealing with much smaller samples of the local moth population but I hope that I’ll be able to keep this up through the seasons and gradually get an impression of the bigger picture.
I’ve got a number of moth books but I think the essentials are Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland by Paul Waring and Martin Townsend and Field Guide to the Micro Moths of Great Britain and Ireland by Phil Sterling and Mark Parsons. Both are illustrated by Richard Lewington.
Moths are so variable that its helpful to check out other books and to Google the species and conjure up dozens of images of it.
AMONGST THE usual suspects – peppered, ‘clay’, footman, heart and dart – rounded up in the moth trap this morning there’s a new and, as a change from all those little brown jobs, a suitably distinctive looking moth. I sketch it several times to take in the appearance of it.
Those swirls at the ends of its forewings remind me of knots in wood. It’s the pebble prominent, Notodonta ziczac, the ‘pebble’ being the light brown area rather than the swirl. It’s a common and widespread moth of mature woodland, hedges and gardens; habitats that Coxley Valley has a plentiful supply of.
The burnished brass, Diachhrysia chrysitis, is a moth found ‘almost everywhere’ but typically in gardens and in hedges and on rough ground. One of its foodplants is nettle, so it should feel at home in our garden.
I’d describe its background colour as pale straw with perhaps the slightest tint of lime. 
The front of the head is ginger in contrast to the mottled brown of its other markings. By breaking up the colour like this and breaking up its shape with tufts and a small cockscomb this moth could pass itself off as a broken off piece of plant debris.
Playing dead, as it helpfully remained while I drew this, it would be perfectly disguised amongst summer leaf litter.
Like the burnished brass, the small magpie, Eurrhypara hortulata, a micro-moth that is 12mm long with a 2cm wingspan, is found in hedges and in gardens. Its larvae will also feed on nettles.
As usual there were a couple of less distinctive moths in the moth-trap that I’ve been unable to identify. Knowing how variable moths can be in size and colour left me struggling to match this moth with any particular species in the book. It’s tempting to lump puzzlers this as all being variations of that most typical of little brown moths, the uncertain.
But having said that it could in fact be the architypical little grey moth, the imaginatively named grey.
Just because I think I won’t be able to identify a moth doesn’t mean that I have to ignore it. This dark little moth with a thin white crescent was about 1cm long.
ALONG WITH TWO white ermines in the moth-trap this morning (and the usual one that got away) I found this unfamiliar species. It wasn’t too difficult to track down in the book thanks to those straw-coloured bands along the edges of its wings, made more conspicuous by a flash of black alongside. There are also two oval or kidney-shaped markings outlined in white and its underwings are conspicuously off white.
It’s the flame shoulder, Ochropleura plecta, a common resident. In a good year in Yorkshire there will be two generations, although the second will not be so numerous. Further north in Scotland there would be one generation, in southern Britain two.
The Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland warns that it ‘comes to light, when it flies wildly and has the unfortunate habit of occasionally entering the ears of moth recorders near the light!’
This one was flying wildly around its bug box so I released it as soon as I’d sketched and photographed it as best I could.
The little moth in the top left corner of my sketch is a small dusty wave, Idea seriata, which is often found near houses, sometimes on window boxes and potted plants. I think that I’ve seen this indistinct little moth before, resting on the wall by the back door. Some pug moths look very similar.
PEOPLE HAVE said to me that the season is running about a month behind average but this weekend we suddenly caught up by buying some vegetable plants from the garden centre and getting another bed and a half planted out. This is half the available space and as we had previously planted a bed with onion sets and potatoes so we’re now almost there. All we need to do now is watch it grow. And a bit of weeding.
As often happens, only one of our two espalier apples has blossomed. This year it’s the single espalier Golden Spire cooking apple which has been covered in blossom while the double espalier (imagine a capital Y but the the two arms curving out to rise vertically) is either late or it’s taking a year off. My quick watercolour sketch is of the Golden Hornet crab apple (left) which always has plenty of blossom.
After all that work at the weekend I deserved to put my feet up this evening . . . and I owed it to myself to do a drawing just for the fun of doing a drawing.
I’ve been rummaging through old sketchbooks to track down some illustrations for a magazine article which reminded me how much I enjoyed drawing such mundane subjects.
WE’RE A BIT concerned about the great spotted woodpecker that we’ve seen a couple of times by the nestbox by the back door. The blue tits have been busy but as far as we know there are no chicks in the box so far.
This morning the woodpecker perched briefly on the front of the box. It’s not that I want it to go hungry but we did invite the blue tits to nest here by erecting the box so I feel as if we have a duty of care.
We can’t keep an eye on it from dawn to dusk but if we see peck marks appearing around the entrance hole I’ll try getting a strip of metal cut to protect it. Just hope it doesn’t succeed in breaking in at a first attempt.
IN DECEMBER I bought myself a copy of The Allotment Year, fully intending to read the summary of jobs for each month and to put as many as I could into practice. Here we are one quarter of the way into the year and I’ve yet to do that. Perhaps April will be the time to start in earnest.
Thanks to the impetus given by having Paul the gardener coming for several morning sessions we did manage to do some of the structural tasks such as replacing the shed but it’s hard to see what I could have done to advance the planting of the vegetable patch when you look out on today’s blanket of snow.
Typically after snow there’ll be a degree of melting, followed by refreezing but this time the snow stayed powdery enough for the wind to blow it into drifts. Not the 15 feet deep drifts that they’ve had in Cumbria and elsewhere but when you tramp down our garden it’s obvious that in the shelter of our house the snow is shallower than it is further down and I think at least some of this reflects where the wind has scoured away and redeposited the powdery snow.
I can imagine that there would be turbulence in the lee of our house with more slack spots further down the garden, sheltered as it is by hawthorn hedges.
I’m glad I made the decision to start feeding the birds again. There are no small mammal tracks around the bird feeders. The largest footprints are those of the pheasants. Other than my size 13s that is.