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