Moths 2: the middle years. Life with Lockdown. Behaviour Patterns

MOTHS 2; the middle years. Living with Lockdown. Behaviour Patterns

Teenage years brought their own interests and distractions and the natural history was eclipsed until I was a student and met Tony 2 (Tony 1 was my childhood mothing friend). He too had the same interests in nature and the countryside and my dormant interest was reawakened.

I subsequently mothed at intervals, first on Bardsey, an island off the NW Welsh coast,  where we lived and farmed for six years in the 1960s. Backed by George Evans the warden of the Bird Observatory on the island, we went the rounds of the Hebe hedges in my garden where plenty of moths were attracted to its flowers. Potting up the moths, we retreated to the kitchen and struggled to identify them ,using the South books of my childhood. Then when our family moved ashore I made a makeshift trap with our children, by then age 6 and 7, out of a tea chest, with an ordinary household Tungsten 100W lamp. We caught quite well until our resident sparrows tumbled to the fact they could get in and have a good meal among the eggs trays, so we stopped.

The next episode followed when the kids left home in the early ‘80s and Tony and I joined the recently-formed Caradon Field Club in East Cornwall. The activities included moth trapping led by two really knowledgeable men with generators and powerful mercury vapour lamps. Trapping was done in various sites throughout  the Caradon area , members standing round the sheet, and moths were tubed, identified and handed round. They were convivial evenings and for me a steep learning curve. Encouraged by this I bought a small portable Heath Trap with a blue 6W Actinic tube, run off a motorbike battery. This I would put in various woodland sites around home, leave it on all night and retrieve it in the morning to identify and count the catch. I would be reluctant to do that now for fear of theft.  That was back in the mid 1080s.

 My old Heath trap, now run sometimes by our daughter in NW Wales.

As keen travelling campers, we took the trap overseas too. On a couple of occasions when in Yugoslavia (Tito had only just died and it was before the country broke apart ) we had unexpected guests . First a man cycling home along the footpath. He turned out to have fought, as a boy, with the Partisans in the War and afterwards as one of a Partisans’ choir, had come to sing in Plymouth. All this in fractured English. Another  Yugoslavian visitor was  a small scorpion and another time a very big centipede. It made me careful about how I handled the egg trays in the mornings!

Living with Lockdown

Not even Lockdown is all bad, at least for those of us fortunate to live in the country with gardens and countryside accessible from our doors. We are able to witness the spring awakening and so far have been blessed with sun and warm weather. All so much more restorative than if this was upon us with dour weather in mid-winter.

For the past month we have spent virtually all day, every day in the garden. There is always plenty to do in our ¾ acre patch, getting into corners we normally ignore, partly to make room for the veg we normally grow in our allotment. This, because of mixed messages about access, we have abandoned for the duration.

It’s not all toil; we spend upwards of an hour partway through each afternoon, sitting in the sun just looking at the birds, butterflies and other wildlife. Our resident Grass Snake population, seen over many years,either as the adult, caste skins, hatched eggs in the compost,or tiny juveniles, appeared this year swimming across the pond.

You would think that watching everything so closely  that change would seem to happen very slowly, but no! the day-by-day growth of leaves, opening of flowers, amazing appearance overnight of weeds, is happening with astonishing speed. 

Flowers of the Wych Elm appear in early March.

 Wych Elm seeds and new young leaves. The Yellowish winged seeds called Samaras show up among the young leaves.

As the biggest tree in the garden, this Wych Elm is a staging post for all the birds that use the garden. They feed, preen, sit and look, and display, to each other. This year a nest box on the main trunk had been taken by a pair of Nuthatches, displaced from their usual hole in our house wall by House Sparrows.

Regular Behaviour Patterns

In the winter we notice a regular pattern of visits to the feeders by a variety of birds which stay and feed and drink for perhaps half an hour and then disappear, to return later to go through the same behaviour. each species to their favoured food.  Now we are noticing a similar regular pattern. About 4 o’clock a succession of birds perch in the branches of an Amelanchier and in ones and twos fly down to the pond below to drink and a wash and brush-up.

We noticed a similar cyclic feeding pattern of birds in Australia. Camping in the Outback, like all wildlife in arid areas, we were attracted by water.From our camp, set back a discreet distance from the water and watching the comings and goings in late afternoon to even the merest puddle, we often saw birds which had eluded us in the heat of the day. A constant stream of birds jostled at the water’s edge, drinking and even plunging into the water to wash. 

The larger waterholes were usually lined with trees and bushes. When in flower they were a mecca for nectar-feeding and insectivorous birds and big flocks of mixed species would appear, feed for perhaps twenty minutes then disappear on down the creek line to other water holes.  Perhaps a couple of hours later, they would reappear and feed again presumably when the nectar and insects were replenished.

 

Galena crossing over the Murchison River, Western Australia

Easter in the Inny Valley. Purple Toothwort & Oil Beetles

Good Friday in the Inny Valley 

Sitting on the bank of the River Inny having a Good Friday picnic (this was in the carefree days of 2016) we now fast-forward to the same day four years later. It is as if we had snoozed in the sun and then woken up in the middle of a sci fi story. It is Lockdown in spring 2020. Now at least, we have another day of glorious sunshine and the privilege of a garden.

The natural world continues its cycle and my notes about that day four years ago thankfully still apply as if it were now.

I quote “It was sunny and quiet. The river level was quite high and  the water not very clear. It rippled over the rocky bed making a subdued plashing sound. Here and there the shore had patches of stones or sand. In one place there were great white sploshes where a Heron had been standing at the water’s edge. Another little sandy beach had a freshly-made Otter sandcastle, marking its territory.

Just as we sat down, a sulphur yellow male Brimstone dashed past, and then a very sluggish Peacock, which fluttered a few yards and settled with flat wings spread out to bask on a  winter-seared tussock of grass. A Speckled Wood appeared and disappeared in the dappled shade of the riverside trees. Recently I saw  ‘Wood Argus’ in my Dad’s list of butterflies he’d seen around Moretonhampstead in Aug 1928 . I’d never heard of it so I looked it up in the 1916 book on butterflies & moths which he had used, and there sure enough, it was the old name for the Speckled Wood. This earlier name presumably refers to the mythological reference to Argus the Watchful One, deriving from the several ‘eye spots’ in its markings.    

 The golden shining stars of Lesser Celandines looked up at the sun. A pair of Long-tailed tits sent up puffs of pollen as they fed among the Alder Catkins and a pair of Goldcrests fossicked about in the ivy smothering the next tree along the bank. Nuthatches were calling repeatedly in a nearby oak, the fluting notes carrying through the stillness. I thought a bumble bee was passing to and fro, but it was Tony snoring softly beside me.

Moschatel flower

At the foot of the riverside alders were the diminutive greenish flowers of Moschatel. Its five faces gives it the nick-name of Town Hall Clock and its generic name Adoxa means ‘un-showy’. As the plant matures the leaves grow bigger before dying down and disappearing among later lush growth of other plants.

The clear blue sky of earlier was getting smudged by veils of high cloud, and as we walked back along the valley a light south-west breeze picked up."

The Inny is the lowest tributary of significant size to join the Tamar before it becomes tidal. Rising  near Davidstow on the eastern edge of Bodmin Moor  it runs  for  twenty miles through attractive, quiet countryside, with at least nine mills at  intervals before it joins the Tamar at Inny Foot within the extensive Tavistock Woodlands. This is the collective name of several old Oak valley woodlands with big areas of coniferous plantation. It once belonged to the Duke of Bedford who had rides driven through the area to enable his guests to enjoy the woodland which he enhanced with plantings of rhododendrons. At the junction of the two rivers, there was once an ornamental lake called Inny Mere and here, even today there are still botanical relics of this time: the big white-flowered Japanese Heliotrope cousin of our familiar and very invasive Winter Heliotrope (Petasites fragrans), a big stand of Royal Fern and the remains of a Gunnera plant.

Purple Toothwort

In early spring the leafless flowers of Purple Toothwort can be seen growing in clumps on these woodland river banks. It is a parasitic plant, growing mainly on willow and poplar roots. It was introduced to this country as an ornamental oddity in the late 1800s. I have never seen it growing up-stream of these Tavistock Woodlands in either the Inny or the Tamar valleys and my private theory is that it was introduced perhaps accidentally during the Duke of Bedford’s landscaping and planting activities here, and has now spread in the area during floods.

Clumps of Purple Toothwort growing on roots of Willow.

Purple Toothwort closer up.

Oil Beetles

O

Violet Oil Beetle

Oil Beetles can be seen now. These rather ungainly flightless beetles crawl around, feeding on flowers or trundling over bare ground The commonest around here are Violet and Black oil Beetles and they can be difficult to differentiate as the blue-violet iridescence can occur on either. Their wings are vestigial, the wing cases or elytra only cover part of the vastly enlarged abdomen. Reaching a size of 2 to 3 centimetres, this beetle gets its name because as a defence it will exude unpleasant caustic oil droplets.

The female lays her eggs in a hole in the turf and the tiny young hatch and crawl into flowers, ambushing certain solitary bees. A bizarre story of parasitism then unfolds. When a bee  alights, these  larval‘ triangulins’  hitch a lift and are taken below ground to the bee’s  nest with its egg and store of pollen  which is then fed upon by the Oil Beetle larvae until they pupates and the following year emerge as adults.

Oil Beetle larvae orTriangulins photoed by our daughter this spring in NW Wales

Triangulin close up

As in the case of so many insects now, Oil Beetles are becoming less common; two of our five native species are now rare and another is believed to be extinct.

Not Wild about Mallorca after all, so it's MOTHS 1

Not Wild about Majorca after all!  So it's MOTHS 1.

Nightingales singing everywhere, and the air full of the sweet scent of orange blossom. This is my memory of Mallorca in May ’84. We booked again this year. It’s a mistake to try and repeat a success so this time we arranged the last ten days in March, birdwatching in the marshland in the East of the island. But coronoavirus put paid to that.

So instead of reporting on that non-event I will begin the story woven through different times of my life : MOTHS.

About ten years ago I was ill and pretty inactive for a twelvemonth. Nature abhors a vacuum we were taught in science at school so I picked up a quieter occupation which had seized my attention as a child and which I’d picked up and dropped at intervals since: MOTHS!

Towards the end f the War when we were 8 or 9 the boy next door and I were close companions, going from one craze to another according to the season  -- birds in winter, flowers as they appeared in the spring, butterflies and moths in the summer. We ranged far and wide in the quiet countryside of rural Hertfordshire. We were given complete freedom, going home hot, or wet, often laden with treasures, when hungry. ‘Conservation’ was a thing of the future and we picked and collected and painstakingly identified without the stultifying political correctness of today. I’m not excusing; we were children of our times, and lived a life of first-hand experience of the small and near.

Living as we did in war-time, with few resources, we made do with what was to hand. Our butterfly nets were made with a ring of stout wire spliced onto a hazel stick; the bag made of window net scrounged from our Mums' rag bags. Our catches (even then, we only collected one of a kind) were killed in a lidded jam jar with Mum’s washing ammonia poured into a layer of plaster of Paris in the bottom of the jar. We read that crushed Laurel leaves were good but Laurel didn’t romp through the Hertfordshire woods as it sometimes does here in Cornwall. And even then, cyanide was out of the question! 

Our setting boards were scrounged cork mats, our setting pins coarse dressmaking pins.  For display cases we begged  cardboard stocking boxes from the local haberdashery shop, and mounted our set specimens on bits of cork glued to the base of the  box. The glue was made from pieces of amber-coloured solid calves’foot jelly melted to a sticky consistency with boiling water. I found a lump of this in my Dad’s ‘useful drawer’.

Our bible was a book of my Dad's, Furneaux's 'The Outdoor World' which was a mine of information.

Our 'bible'

This book was full of helpful information, these days quite amusingly out-dated.

We labelled our specimens when we had thumbed through our book often enough to stumble on the right illustration, and when the box was full we covered it with cellophane. We stored our boxes under our beds when the season was over, and we went back to bird watching and damming streams. We were crestfallen  to find our precious moth collections were extensively damaged by spiders and mites by the time the craze was upon us the next year.

Daytime was butterflying and fishing sticklebacks and little crayfish from the local chalk stream, but the long evenings of double summertime in the school summer holidays was Moth time. We gathered great armfuls of ragwort flowers from the nearby field (where, interestingly,  the farmer’s cart horses were turned out after work and grazed, unharmed, around the growing ragwort plants.) and stuck them in buckets of water in the garden to attract the night flying moths. And we used to go up the road to the bombed houses which were flattened in about 1940, where the rubble was soon  taken over by buddleia, the flowers of course being a magnet to the twilight-feeding moths.

 

Buddleia attracts moths at night as well as day flying insects.

 And a huge privet grew in the hedge between our two houses and wild swipes across the white flowers would often catch a moth or two in our nets.

We saved our meagre pocket money and bought the three Richard South books on Butterflies and Moths in  the Warne's Wayside & Woodland series of natural history books.

 It must have been just after the war when we were allowed to go the twenty miles on the train into London, then on the tube to South Kensington, and the Natural History Museum where enquiries at the desk led us to being escorted along a maze of corridors to the back rooms of the Lepidoptera Collection. The curator showed us the multitude of cabinets with hundreds of shallow drawers smelling of camphor (they. too, had trouble with mites!) and left us to try and identify our various intractable problem specimens.  I don’t think that would happen these days. We soon got waylaid by the exotic tropical ones with eyes and tails and glittering colours and I don’t think we ever actually got to identify our own specimens!

All of this natural historying took place at intervals when w e weren’t involved in the quite  complicated hierarchy of all the other local kids’ activities. The Dads were away during the war and we kids ran wild in the weekends and school holidays. Our Mums, worn down with making do and mending,  husbands away , but having to share the house with billeted evacuee children or war workers, were probably glad to see the back of us. Different combination of kids played hare and hounds, tracking each other in the nearby woods, catching newts in the pools in the old gravel workings,  making camps in the woods, making go carts......a feral outdoor life centred on weekends and school holidays, school time largely a forgotten irrelevance!