Westcott, Bucks

The weather proved to be rather different from that expected over the last two week period thanks to the Met Office's usual inability to correctly forecast night-time cloud cover (or lack thereof), so we ended up with three nights of frost under a bright moon.  However, moths still turned out every single night meaning that I had no blanks at all in February which is probably a site record.  The month proved to be one of the wettest on record locally (if not the wettest) and much of our garden has been under water for the majority of it, so I will be interested to see how those species which over-winter as larvae or pupae at or below ground level have fared.

New arrivals were fewer than during the first half of the month but they continued to trickle in with the following added to the year-list: 

     (15th)  Red-green Carpet, Lead-coloured Drab, Oak Nycteoline

     (16th)  Small Brindled Beauty

     (17th)  Epiphyas postvittana

     (18th)  Eudonia angustea

     (23rd)  Mompha jurassicella

     (27th)  Diurnea fagella

The above moths take the garden count for 2024 up to 37 adult species, comprising 22 macros (equalling 2019 as the highest count ever here by the end of February) and 15 micros (beating the previous record of 12 achieved last season).  The number of individual moths seen in the garden over the first two months of the year came to just under 500 which I'm sure must also be a record.

Diurnea fagella, Westcott 27th February

Likely Mompha jurassicella, Westcott 23rd February

Eudonia angustea, Westcott 18th February

Lead-coloured Drab, Westcott 15th February

I'm happy that the putative Mompha jurassicella will prove to be correctly identified but it has been retained for checking.  The Lead-coloured Drab was a fairly nondescript individual, as they often are, but I've had a few more since the 15th which were slightly better marked.

A 7mm early-instar larva of Common Footman was found near the light on 16th February.  That same night brought in the first caddis-fly of the season, illustrated below, while the previous night had produced the year's first smelly sexton beetle Nicrophorus humator as well as the large Vine Weevil Otiorhynchus sulcatus. 

Larva of Common Footman, Westcott 16th February

Caddis Stenophylax permistus, Westcott 16th February

Dave Wilton Westcott, Bucks