Thursday 13 August 2020

It is Fraxini time again!

For the last couple of nights I've been hanging out wine ropes under the Norway Maple in our dark front garden to complement the traps in the back.  When I checked at about 11pm last night, in attendance at the bar were Shuttle-shaped Dart (1), White-point (1), Common Wainscot (1), Straw Underwing (1), Cloaked Minor (1) & Red Underwing (2; a third Red Underwing could also be seen inside the MV trap).  When I checked again at 4am this morning there were only two moths on the wine ropes, a Common Rustic agg. and my first Clifden Nonpareil of the year.  Unlike the Red Underwings which didn't bat an eyelid over my bright head-torch and just carried on feeding, the Clifden was spooked by the light and dropped to the ground so my quick happy-snap below has to be of it on the grass beneath the wine rope.  Still a delight to see!

Clifden Nonpareil, Westcott 13th August

This is only my tenth record since 2017, hardly a huge sample, but it is the earliest example I've seen by exactly two weeks.

Dave Wilton
Westcott, Bucks  
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5 comments:

  1. Andrew Cornick13 August 2020 at 13:34

    Excellent! I'm having my first try with wine ropes at the weekend. Any tips or secret recipe ingedients?
    Andrew Cornick SU28

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  2. Dave Wilton13 August 2020 at 16:13

    Hi Andrew,

    There's nothing secret about wine ropes! Other people may have different ways of doing it but I just heated up half a bottle of cheap red plonk, added half a kilo of granulated sugar when it was nearly boiling, stirred it until the sugar had dissolved then let it cool. The "ropes" can be any strips of material really and just need a good dunking in the wine so that they're soaked. Last year I used redundant curtain tie-backs but I couldn't find them this year so I've used a couple of old tea-towels, rolled them up tightly and used plastic cable ties at each end to keep the roll in place and added a third tie looped around one of the others to provide something to hook over a branch(actually not necessary because you can just drape the whole thing over a branch otherwise. Tip 1: disposable gloves might be handy as putting them out can be a sticky operation. Tip 2: probably not a good idea to leave them out in the daytime - I didn't bring mine in until just now (4pm) and had to fight my way past forty or fifty wasps to get to them!

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  3. Andrew Cornick15 August 2020 at 15:24

    Thanks Dave, that's very helpful. I tried it last night and it attracted a few familiar moths, BUT on the walk back and forth to the ropes I found a Convolvulus Hawk-moth! I'll post a few pics later.

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  4. Marc Botham18 August 2020 at 14:06

    Had my first Clifden in the garden trap on saturday night (15th). They were being recorded in August last year so I was expecting them sooner rather than later. Always nice to get such a fresh specimen - what a beauty!

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  5. Marc Botham18 August 2020 at 14:06

    first of year I mean

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