When I got home earlier this evening, Nichola eventually remembered that whilst out in the garden earlier in the afternoon she'd seen a 'moth-type thing' loitering on a dead daffodil head that maybe I'd be interested in. I fully expected to find either nothing, or most likely an Angle Shades. I was wrong, and grabbed a quick snap with my phone.
Orange-tip - it was a male though you'd be hard pushed to know from this view
When I pointed out to Nichola that it was actually a butterfly, and showed her this snap, she affirmed that it didn't look like that earlier as the wings were all crumpled up. So coupled with the static nature of this individual, it seems very likely that it has actually emerged from an unseen chrysalis and climbed up the nearest stem to dry out / harden up. We do have a few spikes of Cuckooflower down that end of the garden in most years, so I'll have to try and remember to search them this year for larvae.
I don't want anyone to think that I think I am a perfect neighbour, 'cause I'm absolutely sure I'm not. I'm sure some neighbours would prefer that I didn't run light traps at night and loiter around my own garden with a camera. I'm sure some would prefer that I didn't look through my kitchen window at the bird feeder and adjacent scrubby embankment with binoculars. And I'm absolutely sure that some of our neighbours would prefer that we didn't have a cat (and to be honest I'm on their side on that one!). But .... some of our neighbours do things that really piss me off. Inconsiderate parking, footballs banging against our fence, replacing fence panels that are their responsibility with shit ones with the duff side facing our way. Etc.
One of our neighbours has managed to right royally piss me off in the last couple of days. Here's a couple of snaps of our flowering cherry tree at the front of the house.
05/05/2018
13/04/2019
Can you spot the difference (apart from our tree not being in full blossom yet!)?
Yes, there is now an open space to the left of the boundary wall where up until 12/04/2019 there was a lovely fruiting plum tree. In fact, before I left home on Friday morning I even commented to Nichola how the plum tree and our cherry tree were coming on nicely for blossom. I got home later in the day and found that the neighbour had had the tree completely felled and dug out by contractors. I am sure they have some perfectly rational reason for this, but FFS why do it in spring when the tree is just coming into blossom. I don't think anything was nesting in the tree, but I can't be certain.
Anyway, you will realise that there is a completely selfish reason why I liked that tree being there, and of course it is because it was a good host plant for a number of moth species, not least Grapholita funebrana which had just started turning up in the garden trap. I also thought that this tree was the source of my VC55 first Grapholita lobarzweski last year, but it seems that the info on UK Moths is incorrect and this species is actually on apple in the UK rather than plum. Luckily the neighbours at the back have not cut down their apple tree. Yet.
This has been one of those weekends when family committments and/or indifferent weather conspire against me and I've not had a chance to get out. The garden trap has also been pathetic with the very cold nights. Yesterday I knocked up a 2 x 22W synergetic rig to trial, but until we get some half decent conditions it's not worth running.
I have had a larval rearing success though ....
Mullein Moth - larva collected in May last year and reared on buddleia.
One of the occasional threads on here has been 'Overdue', whereby I feature a moth species that has not appeared in the garden for 10+ years. Trouble is I've realised that I am running out of posts for that thread for two reasons. Firstly, now the blog is a good few years old photos of some of the overdue species have already been used on here and I don't want to duplicate, and secondly there are a number of species that for some reason or other I don't have a photo of.
So in another desperate attempt to get value out of my back catalogue I'm launching another thread. This time though, I will not be focussing just on the garden or necessarily just on moths. I'll focus on anything that I have a photo of that is worth airing on here for the first time. First up will be a moth though, and in VC55 terms it's still a good one.
Back on 19/06/2002 I was absolutely surprised and delighted to find a Beautiful Snout in one of my traps at Gisborne's Gorse in Charnwood Lodge during a group session, albeit a knackered individual. This was the first record for the VC since the Victoria County History for Leicestershire was published in 1907, and that is bascially just a list of species apparently recorded in Leics with no dates. There were no further records until I got another in virtually the same spot on 09/06/2006 on another group session. I've not seen one since then, but there have been three other VC55 records. There are a couple of odd records of singles well away from habitat with billberry, at Eyebrook Reservoir on 27/06/2008 and at Barrowden on 27/06/2015, and the last record to date was of two again at Gisborne's Gorse on 26/05/2017.
This is a cracking looking moth, and it's one that I'd be very pleased to see anywhere again - particularly if a nice dark fresh individual.
Today was my first full day back at work since 10th January. I did spend a few hours working from home whilst I was off, and went back on short days last week, but it's not the same. Physically fine, it's more about remembering how to use my brain to juggle several things/people at the same time. Anyway, whilst I was there it was lovely and sunny. As I left it looked like it might cloud over a bit. As I got home it got duller .....
There was enough time to go out and have a look around, but with the sun gone and the light going I decided to not bother and just had a potter about in the garden instead. It seems like it's been quite a while since I actually had a poke around in the garden with the camera, and I was reminded of a few things ..... like .....
It's been a few years since I bothered properly looking at the slugs in the garden, and there may well be new species that I've not seen here before. I've not even scrutinised the 'yellow slugs' properly since the arrival and spread of Irish Yellow Slug in the county. I found a clump today but typically they remained scrunched up and I couldn't coax one to properly stretch out for a better look. I'm pretty sure that all of my garden yellows are now Irish Yellow Slug, but need to check. They're not going anywhere, I just need to remember to get myself in gear and go out collecting a load of slugs from the garden one warm damp night to properly look at them all.
Ambigolimax sp. - 'Greenhouse Slug' or 'Balkan Three Banded Slug' ??
Limacus sp. - (probably) Irish Yellow Slug
This photo also shows how productive lifting a pot can be, if you can be arsed to catch and check all the flat-backed millipedes, woodlice and earthworms ......
Pot and slab lifting also produced a couple of usual suspects.
Leistus fulvibarbis
Orchesella cincta
An out of focus Orchesella villosa
It was around the time of the last couple of shots that I remembered a couple of other things: springtails are massively abundant and ought to be looked for/at more than they have been, and bloody hell I can't actually see and focus on the camera screen properly when shooting hand-held anymore and can't see if the subject is in focus. I need specs.
Other bits didn't need looking for, they were just there.
Brown-lipped Banded Snail
Oddly coloured Green Shieldbug
Marchantia polymorpha - all over the place in the garden now
Ubiquitous Scarlet Lily Beetle - back again to destroy my Snake's-head Fritillaries
I noticed that there are more white Fritillaries this year
In other news, that grubby female Psychid from yesterday is still alive and kicking ... and not egg-laying.
Remember that Psychid case that I found at Ketton Quarry just over a week ago on 29/03/2019? Well bugger me it produced this morning. Whilst this is sometimes good, with Psychidae it can be a bit 50-50 as to whether it's going to be something exciting to look at or not. And in this instance the case produced an apterous little grub-like thing .......
Pupal exuviae from said case
Yes, that is a fully grown adult female moth ....
Still, that in itself confirmed that it cannot possibly be Diplodoma laichartingella or Narycia duplicella as both of those species have fully-winged females. Going back to the case also excludes three other likely (for VC55) species: Luffia lapidella f. ferchaultella, Psyche casta and Taleporia tubulosa. Here it is again, c5.5mm in length, triangular and very slightly tapered at both ends, covered in granular material and fragments of lichen/algae.
The only other group of Psychidae that have been recorded in VC55 are the Dahlica spp. I've only seen these at one site in the county, and there the cases do look similar to this with the exception that they are invariably not so obviously covered in lichen/algae - tending to look more 'sandy' overall. But that is highly likely to be pertinent to the location and substrate rather than being a clear ID feature. Before considering the Dahlica spp. any further, maybe I should think about other non-VC55 Psychidae.
Some I can eliminate quickly based on either the case structure, size and appearance of the apterous female* and/or location: Proutia betulina, Psyche crassiorella, Whittleia retiella, Epichnopterix plumella, Acanthopsyche atra, Pachythelia villosella and Sterrhopterix fusca.
* even for Psychidae, the apterous females in some species go one further by having pretty much no legs or antennae, and it's thought that these extremely maggot-like species disperse by being eaten, digested and shat out by birds with the eggs surviving the journey!
There are a couple of other species:
Bankesia conspurcatella has a case described as 6-8mm, triangluar and tapered at both ends, covered in sand/lichen. However in this species the female has very short antennae with only 5-6 segments which does not fit.
Bacotia claustrella has a case described as 6-7mm, rounded in cross-section and rounded at the rear end, covered in lichen. Again the apterous female has very short antennae, only 6-8 segments.
So having exluded nearly everything, all there is left (on the assumption that it is not new to the UK/science!) are the Dahlica spp. I have seen and reared both Dahlica lichenella and Dahlica triquetrella, both from the dam wall at Swithland Reservoir. Both of these species are parthenogentic (no males) with apterous females that emerge and pretty much immediately start laying eggs within the case and die and shrivel up within a few hours of doing that. There is one other species, Dahlica inconspicuella, which until 28/03/2019 (yes, the day before I found this case) did not exist on the VC55 list. In this species the male is winged, and a group of recorders found males flying about at Charnwood Lodge.
The case is the right size for inconspicuella, on the small side for lichenella and too small for triquetrella. So now to go through a few external features on the apterous female. Firstly it has four tarsal segments, so that along with the size of the case excludes triquetrella which always has five tarsal segments. It has 16 antennal segments, which along with the tarsal segments fits both lichenella and inconspicuella. Crucially though, I can't see any evidence of any spines on the ventral surface of segment 8, which both triquetrella and lichenella have (albeit different structures).
No spines on segment 8 before ovipositor
Pupal exuviae headplate
The other odd thing about this female is that I found it wandering about on the tissue paper in the pot, not sitting on the case. It also seems to be constantly pumping it's back end. If I was a betting man, I would say that it is exuding pheremones to attract a male .... something that would be entirely pointless for lichenella!
It is still alive and kicking now doing the same, and I've seen no evidence of egg-laying. I am as convinced as I can be that this is in fact Dahlica inconspicuella ..... but. I can't find any references anywhere to whether gen. det. preps of Psychidae females are available for comparison, and I can't find any reliable references showing what the pupal exuviae headplate should look like for inconspicuella. For the moment I will hang on to the female and see what it does, and I'll also hang on to the case. If I am wrong and this is in fact lichenella, then in a few weeks I'll have lots of very tiny larvae piddling about in the small glass dish the case and female are now in.
