The new garden moths of 2020

With Covid-19 lockdown hitting some people very hard, it seems churlish to complain about its effects on me. It felt hard – no pub visits with friends, no limited time outdoors and so not much chance for nature photography and long walks with the dog, no rehearsing with C5 The Band nor the bigMouth choir, no panto to plan for etc, like I say, relatively easy, but still hard. Dark Crimson Underwing As such, I was really hoping for an exciting moth year to keep me sane, and I have had some crackers, but numbers and diversity seem to have been low…all I’ve really seen for the last couple of weeks are quite a few Large Yellow Underwings and Square Spot Rustics and little else.. They’re of interest in their own right, of course, but once you’ve seen a few dozen, you’ve seen them all. Gypsy Moth I am yet to see the so-called Blue Underwing, the Clifden Nonpareil, a beautiful and fascinating European species that seems to be spreading northwards (I hear they’ve been ticked in Shropshire now). It’s odd a fellow moth-er in this village had two of these a couple of weeks ago. I did see its relative the Dark Crimson Underwing a month before he did. That species is usually only seen in the New Forest but is also spreading its wings so to speak. Figure of Eighty Anyway, without going into all the statistical detail of 250 or so species I’ve noted this year so far more than 30 of them were new for the garden (NFG), new to me (NTM), in f...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Lepidoptera Sciencebase Source Type: blogs