Dusty Shears and Twin-spot Carpet

July 2006 was a wonderful month for butterflies. If you visited the Sun Lane Nature Reserve recently you could not fail to notice the meadow browns, small tortoiseshells and ringlets, the latter only a recent addition to our Wharfedale list. These insects are creatures of the day, but what about the night shift - the nocturnal moths?

The best way to find out is to run a moth-trap. WNS has recently bought a Johnson trap - an easily portable cube of black nylon mesh on which a mercury vapour light is positioned, fuelled by a small generator. Pile some empty egg cartons inside, choose your spot, place the trap on a white sheet and, as dusk falls, you're ready to go. The moths are attracted to the light, drop into the cube, where they can shelter among the cartons till morning; then the keen naturalist unpacks and identifies the night's catch before releasing the captives. A couple of weeks ago I was at such an unpacking - the result of a two and a half hour run at Sun Lane.

A new area had been sampled - the old rough pasture near the railway, left undisturbed by the reclamation work and edged with mature trees, ancient hawthorn bushes and a magnificent crab apple. It promised a rich haul, and we were not disappointed - 151 insects in the trap, 51 different species recorded. Some are strikingly handsome like the Burnished Brass with its broad, lustrous gold wing-patches or the tiny Barred Yellow which has a kind of underskirt in an elegant parchment shade with a delicate yellow border. I was particularly impressed by the Swallow-tailed moth - quite large, with big dark eyes. Its flimsy wings are creamy yellow with thin diagonal stripes and tiny pairs of dots on the wing comers, a false eye effect designed to say to predators, "Strike here!" so the insect escapes with only a damaged wing-tip.

To the untutored eye most moths appear rather similar - small and patterned in a rather drab fawn, brown and beige. However, take a magnifying class and a whole new world opens up. The Dusty Shears has subtle patterning and a neat fringe along the wing edge, the Twin-spot Carpet is identified by a delicate tracery of white scalloped lines, and the superficially similar Small Rivulet has a garland-like band of white blotches. The Early Thorn, with its fluted and crimped wing-edges, can come in a range of shades and even different sizes so you have to pay strict attention to structure and design.

Moth names are enchanting in themselves -and tell us a lot about the nineteenth century entomologists who classified and named them Some are descriptive - Mother of Pearl, Straw Dot; some, which seem bizarre at first, allocate the insect to its larger category - Common Footman, Twin-spot Carpet; but others clearly express the delight they inspired - Mottled Beauty, for example. We are currently enjoying an influx of a pretty brown moth, a migrant, the Silver Y, named for the rather wavery silver Y on its wing. They are everywhere, day and night. There is also a species called Golden Y and, to top it all, a Beautiful Golden Y!

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