A dark moth

 I have run my traps twice in the last week.  Sunday night was after a warm day and produced significantly more moths than on the first night of the month, but only a few more species.  I haven't made a final tally of either night yet, but the 1st produced around 220 moths of about 35 species, whereas the 5th was my busiest-ever September night with around 450 moths of about 40 species.

The difference was largely made up by huge numbers of Square-spot Rustic and Common Wainscot.  I am going cross-eyed counting all of the "X", "V" and "I" tally marks in my notebook, but I think there were 177 of the former and 113 of the latter.  Neither night produced anything particularly noteworthy, but there were a couple of satisfying appearances:

The 1st produced my first-ever record of Small Square-spot (two, in fact), and the 5th produced five in total.  Sunday night also produced a couple of Cypress Pug: I have had these in past years, but feared I would have lost them when I had the two biggest out of five huge Leyland cypresses felled earlier this year.

An almost-exception to the "nothing particularly noteworthy" summary was a late and tatty example of Common/Lesser Common Rustic. This is a rare visitor to my garden - there were none at all in 2020 - possibly because I do very little trapping between mid-July and late August due to absence and other commitments.

One of the moths on the 1st was hard to identify as it was very dark.  My provisional conclusion is that it is simply a very dark form of Phycita roborella, but I'd be glad for any confirmation.  I'm familiar with the normal form and know that some can be fairly dark, but this one is very dark.  There are two versions of the photograph below: one is substantially unmodified; the other has been fiddled with to try to show up any pattern or colour.

Possible Phycita roborella
Newton Longville, 1st September 2021
(top: natural colour/contrast; bottom: enhanced)

When I get chance I do try to record some of the other orders attracted by the lights, though I do this in moderation as apart from a few of the easier caddisflies, the others take me ages.  I don't attempt anything needing a microscope to get to species level, nor do I normally "do" Ichneumons or Diptera, but I did make an exception for Volucella zonaria - an enormous hornet-mimicing hoverfly with only one potential confusion species.  I also made an exception for a nice-looking fly which I initially guessed was a kind of picture-wing fly, but which after much work turned out to be Anomoia pumundana, a kind of fruit-fly.  Apparently, its larval foodplant is primarily hawthorn berries, a plentiful shrub in my garden.  These will end up on iRecord.

Anomoia pumundana
Newton Longville, 5th September 2021

The one slight disappointment recently was that a walk around the local fields inspecting the blackthorns didn't find any signs of mines of Lyonetia prunifoliella, so they may not have reached my corner of the county yet.

Tim Arnold

Newton Longville, Bucks