Beccles Marsh SMG event 10/05/2013 – a bit slow…

As the forecast was poor for Saturday night, we decided to move the event to Friday, hoping that conditions would be better. It was good to find that the breeze had dropped on site so we went ahead with trapping along the river Waveney, the same spot where we saw both Balsam carpet and Double kidney last year. A Barn owl hunted along the edge of the river whilst we were setting up, giving quite close views, a nice start to the evening. With 9 traps deployed, wandering around at dusk with nets resulted in a few moths being caught, including Water carpet, Agonopterix ocellana and Common wave. When it was too dark to look anymore, we sat down around the sheet to await the moths. In fact we did a lot of waiting as moths were very slow to come in, and this continued right through the trapping session. Some traps only managed to catch 2-3 moths in total! Thankfully some did do better, so it wasn’t all a waste of time. Best species seen from the 35 recorded included Pale pinion, Reed dagger, Acleris cristana (2), Sallow kitten (2), Herald, Waved umber. Commonest moth seen was probably Pebble prominent, quite a number of these came in to the sheet light after 11pm. We also had both Pale prominent and Swallow prominent too. Unfortunately we didn’t catch any of our target moth, the first brood Balsam carpet.
Larvae of Drinker, Lesser yellow underwing, Broad bordered yellow underwing and an unidentified wainscot larva were also found whilst walking between traps, adding a few more species to the list for the night.
At around 11.45pm the wind started to pick up and rain began to fall so it was decided to pack up. No more moths were really coming in anyway.
So a slight improvement in species seen including a few that were firsts for the year for many, hopefully things will only get better :)

Neil

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