A Blog for moth recorders in Bucks, Berks and Oxon
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.
Nice one, Andy! When/where did you find it?
ReplyDelete6th 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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