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.
WE CAUGHT smooth newts, freshwater leeches and pond snails in one of the ponds at Hassacarr nature reserve, Dunnington Common, near York on this morning’s Wakefield Naturalists Society field meeting. This is only the second occasion on which I’ve tried out the possibilities of underwater movies using my Olympus μ Tough so using the iMovie app I’ve put together a few clips in this YouTube video.
Sketching the newt as it swam around the tank gives some impression of its movements but you can’t improve on the video clip in the way it shows the looping movement of the leech.
Tubular Water-dropwort, Oenanthe fistulosa, grows around the edges of the largest pond. It one of the rarer species to be found on the reserve, declining as its wetland habitats disappear.
Around York, a city long famous for its flooding, wetlands is sometimes seen as prime real estate. Earlier this year one developer was frustrated that his plan to build an out of town department store was held up for several months because the resident population of great crested newts had to be relocated.
We found no great crested today at Dunnington but they are often found on pond-dipping days on the reserve.
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.
IT’S GOOD to be back at Newmillerdam and on a morning like this I can’t resist at least trying to paint a lightning watercolour (below) when we stop for coffee and, as we set off back along the lakeshore, I’m tempted to try to photograph a couple of families of waterbirds.
Much as I like my Olympus Tough, it does struggle with anything animate as several seconds can pass between pressing the button and the photograph actually being taken, so there’s always an element of luck involved.
A few weeks ago we saw one of the mute swan cygnets tucked between the wings of one of the parents as it swam along, a wise precaution as some of the pike in Newmillerdam are enormous and would be capable of pulling a young cygnet below the surface. The other cygnet followed closely in it’s lake with the other parent bringing up the rear and keeping a watchful eye on the family.
I notice in this morning’s photograph that the male, the cob, is leading. He’s got that projection above his bill.
I squat down to see if the coots near the boathouse will feed their young on freshwater mussels again, as they did last month. One of the parents dives down a couple of times but in the short time that I’m watching catches nothing. As I’m kneeling there a toddler, who has just picked up a feather, and his mum come and stand alongside us.
‘Can you tell me how many baby birds there are?’ she asks him.
‘One, two, three, four . . . and two mummy birds.’
‘They could be a mummy and a daddy?’ suggests his grandad.
‘Are you allowed to say that nowadays?’ I ask.
‘It’s not P.C.’ says grandad, ‘but I think with coots we can be fairly sure.’
‘Even a coot is entitled to life choices.’ I suggest.
‘We’re not doing mummies and daddies yet,’ explains mum, ‘just the babies.’
It’s good to hear parents and grandparents encouraging young children to explore the world of nature and not to put them off with too much health and safety.
This brood of coot youngsters have lost their ginger top-knots and the hint of red on their beaks that they had a month ago and they’re now in the sober plumage of adolescent chicks.
Further up the lake we see a single great-crested grebe. We’ve previously seen a pair here and I hope that some day we’ll see them with their stripy young again.
IT’S EXPECTING a lot to wedge my wildflower meadow between the potato & onion bed and the bottom corner of the garden. I’ve still got to to dig out the chicory that has muscled out all the competition on the strip alongside the hedge, on the right of my photograph. I weeded this attractive but invasive wild flower out along the other two edges the triangle in the spring and resowed with a wildflower meadow seed mix which has sprouted so luxuriantly that I now need to trim it to create a perimeter path.
I’m pleased that in the central area the yellow rattle is flowering again this year. The theory is that it will keep the grasses in check because it is semi-parasitic on their roots but the grasses are thriving.
I HAVE A HABIT of editing out the buses, vans and cars as I draw and I realise that for Horbury High Street I’m giving the wrong impression so, as I draw the Beauty Spa (originally a butcher’s shop) on the right, I add whatever figures happen to be passing at the time. The lad standing with his scooter adds a useful spot of contrast with his red T-shirt.
This is the view from Horbury’s newest café, the Caffé Capri, which the only one where you can sit out watching the world go by. It might just be Horbury on our weekly date with my mum’s shopping but in this weather it feels like being on holiday. Especially when accompanied by a small potato tortilla and a glass of chilled pinot grigio.