Thunderstorms bring bumper catch.

My first post for a while as I’ve been very busy and also away on holiday enjoying the Lepidopteria of Bulgaria!
With the heat yesterday due to spark off storms, thought I’d put some traps out in the reedbed area on the golf course to see if White-mantled wainscot was on the wing. Woken up by the thunder and lightning in the early hours, so got up at 5am to go and check the traps. Had to wait for a while as it then tipped it down with rain as a storm came right overhead, bit risky to go out in that! Once at the traps, all were very wet unfortunately but on the plus side looked full of moths. Another deluge forced me undercover again for a short while, then the rain gave up so I could get on with recording. Took me nearly 3 hours to go through, Denice was getting ready to send out a search party for me as it had taken so long! In the end 223 species were noted, with a couple more to still sort at a later date. Quite a lot of the large number of small micros like Coleophs, Cnephasia and gelechids ignored due to lack of time, if I’d looked at these who knows what the final total would have been? Migrants were represented by 1 Silver Y and loads of Plutella xylostella. Strange that no other migrant species were found, a trend that others have noted as well recently I see. Due to wet weather on the continent perhaps, have heard that there has been a lot of rain there (and in eastern Europe too where I was last week, affecting numbers of Leps quite significantly).
So the highlights were all ‘resident’ species. Best macro 2 of the target moth, White-mantled wainscot, good to note the colony here is still extant. Others: White satin, Festoon (10), Nut-tree tussock (over 30 noted), Small scallop (3), Canary-shouldered thorn (first for year), Shaded fan foot (4, all worn), Small rufous, Copper and Svensson’s copper underwings (first for year), Tree-lichen beauty (2, first for year), Silky wainscot, Lesser spotted pinion, Beautiful yellow underwing and Dotted fan foot. Also noticeable were large numbers of both Pebble and Scalloped hook tips, certainly the highest number I’ve ever seen anywhere, didn’t count then unfortunately again due to the huge volume of moths.
Of the micros, best was a single Caloptilia hemidactylella. I’ll only list a few others as there were a lot of species. Caloptilia populetorum (2), Lesser wax moth, Pyla fusca (only a few records of this for the site), Epinotia signatana (at least 10 noted, again only odd records for this), Blastodacna atra (second site record) and Carpatolechia alburnella (3). I always hope that these warm humid nights will bring new species to the site list but none were noted this time but with the warm weather set to continue hopefully something will turn up!

Happy trapping!

Neil

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