Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
My friend John Gardner, celebrating his birthday today, has built up an impressive list by running an ultra-violet light moth trap in his garden. Hopefully these reprobates haven’t turned up.
Moths have a bad name in my brother Bill’s childhood writing. He wrote this damming indictment aged six and it’s survived in a school exercise book from his infant school days.
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.
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.
1.10 p.m., Horbury; A BARRED brown Sparrowhawk is being mobbed by a flock – a ‘charm’ but I’m sure that the Sparrowhawk doesn’t see it that way – of about 20 Goldfinches over the trees by the Memorial Park. It swoops over the town hall then soars up towards the convent, pausing occasionally at the top of its arc of flight, as if it’s considering stopping to hover like a Kestrel.
The new Field Guide to the Micro Moths of Great Britain and Ireland by Phil Sterling and Mark Parsons, illustrated by Richard Lewington, has inspired me to have a go at setting up a moth trap at the end of the garden in my recently mown and hacked back ‘meadow area’.
Having asked a couple of friends who’ve done a bit of moth trapping – in fact one of them has done moth surveys for a living since since he left college – I’ve decided to go for the cheaper but more fiddly option of making my own moth trap.
The basis of this is a low energy flourescent blacklight; a 20 watt ultra violet light as used in discos.
As I walk down the garden to close the greenhouse, 14 House Martins are circling and chattering a hundred feet above the meadow. A reminder that autumn hasn’t totally set in although it won’t be long before they set off back to Africa.
I pick a couple of Supersweet tomatoes in the greenhouse and a couple of raspberries from the canes as I walk past, none of which makes it back to the kitchen.
By the way, apologies for the scrappy drawings but there’s a reason for these. I’m out of the habit of regular sketching, particularly of wildlife subjects so I decided that to get myself back in drawing mode for the autumn I’d go back to the main method that I used for my Wild West Yorkshire nature diary in the early years, drawing the day’s wildlife observations from memory in as simple a way as possible, in this case fountain pen and watercolour crayons.
To get over the time that I spend sitting at the computer writing and revising text, I decided that I’d also write my notes in the sketchbook.
Writing by hand makes me slow down and think about what I’m writing and it usually turns out to be coherent enough not to need the revisions and tweaks that I always find myself doing when I’m typing my thoughts directly to the computer.