Saturday 25 January 2014

Mompha lacteella

Every time I've thought about going out and running a light in the new year laziness or the weather have persuaded me not to. However, I'm still building a moth-list, by dissecting left-overs from the last couple of years. The other day I managed a kind of cricketing-type hat-trick: Three in a row; in this case three species that were 'new-for-me'. Two weren't Upper Thames moths, but the third, from my back garden in Chorleywood, Bucks, turned out to be a Mompha lacteella. Peter Hall kindly confirmed this. I've checked with Martin Albertini and he could find only one previous record of this species in Bucks, in 1928.
Andy King.

2 comments:

  1. Nice one, Andy! When/where did you find it?

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    1. 6th of July 2013, in my back garden in Chorleywood. It came to light. Incidentally, congratulations on your back garden record. I'd say that was a pretty phenomenal number for a garden. Like martin, I'm not jealous at all. I'm guessing you probably have a fair bit of variety of habitat near you. Also, when the summer got hot, maybe moths started wandering more than normal away from home; I believe high levels of vagrancy have been observed during droughts before. By comparison, my garden has yielded 379 species in approx. 3 years of trapping, including 32 described as local, 4 Nb and 2 pRDB3 (not that all that is used anymore, of course).

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