Lunar Hornet and Sallow Clearwing

I started trying for Lunar Hornet with the LUN lure in the last week of June, but it wasn’t until July 3 that one showed up, which was a couple of days earlier than I had one last year.

Having been successful, I switched to the SAL lure in the same place (by a mature willow), but so far without success.
Then this afternoon I took the lure to some local woodland, where I have been eyeing up the patches of sallow as potential clearwing stake-outs, and hung the lure upwind of the first patch I came to. Some 45 minutes later, after my butterfly transect, I returned to check the trap to find it contained a single Sallow Clearwing! Based on Dave’s comments about how skittish they are, I took several shots through the clear plastic of the lure as insurance before removing the top. It’s as well I did, because as soon as I opened it up, he was away!

                                            Sallow patch where clearwing found 

I then moved 100 m further to another patch, hung up the lure...and within 10 minutes a Sallow Clearwing was buzzing around the lure. I managed one or two poor photos before it left without entering the trap. So, it seemed as if every patch of sallows might hold clearwings, but two other patches yielded nothing.
However, it wasn’t until I got home and started editing the photos, that I noticed that the second individual had a very similar set of markings to the first one, in particular a break in the middle yellow band, on which basis I concluded that it was almost certainly the same individual that had followed me from the first patch!
Nevertheless I would be amazed if there were not others elsewhere in the wood given the number of good-looking sallow patches there are.
Since this was good mature oak woodland, I also deployed the VES lure, but, as seems to have been the case this year, it only attracted an Orange-tailed Clearwing.

Phil T