Tuesday 31 May 2022

Re: 2 clearwings

A correction is needed to Dave Ferguson's post on 27th May and it is better to repeat part of that post rather than rely on further comments to the original so that the information doesn't get lost.  Both of Dave's moths were Yellow-legged Clearwing and Martin Townsend has explained to me why that is so.  I've highlighted the features on a cropped version of Dave's first image below (the putative Currant Clearwing):

Yellow-legged Clearwing

This is a rather worn specimen but the broken yellow band at the top of the abdomen and the red scales still visible on the central band of the forewing indicate that this is Yellow-legged, not Currant.  The one visible hind-leg also still shows the typical Yellow-legged feature of an obvious band of black scales at about the mid-point.  It goes to show that just a cursory glance at some clearwings can be misleading.  My original comment about them sometimes coming to the "wrong" lure still applies, even though it wasn't so in this case, which makes a close look doubly important.  

Dave Wilton

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