Wouldn’t you just believe it, prior to this event we
had a week or more of sunny weather, but come Saturday the weather was overcast
and drizzling, not good conditions for butterflies and day flying moth species.
However, we had to work with what had and we did our best to make the most of
things - and in fact it turned out to be an excellent day.
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| The trapping site |
After meeting in the carpark, we hiked up to the
trapping area by about 1:30 to get set up. On reaching our desired trapping
site, even before we got setup we more or less walked into a Small Eggar Larval nest (an uncommon species in the
county and a Nationally scarce B species throughout the UK), which was a real
treat for us all to see and, furthermore, throughout the afternoon three more
larval nests were discovered making four in all, a great record for the site.
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| Small Eggar larval nest |
After marvelling over the Small Eggar larval nests we
set up our two pheromone traps. One pheromone trap was for our target species,
the Six-belted Clearwing and we were trying another pheromone for the
Yellow-legged clearwing just on the off-chance one was in the vicinity. We all
gazed at these pheromone traps for a while until we got goggle-eyed then we started
to fan out, searching for other day-flying moths and butterflies.
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| Checking the net |
Butterflies, it has to be said, were very thin on the
ground and during the afternoon we only saw three species which braved the
gloomy conditions; Small Heath, Ringlet and Meadow Brown.
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Small Heath and Ringlet
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We did slightly better for moths, recording 3 macro
species (including the Small Eggar) and 9 micro species, which included 3 plume
species, one of which was a new county record for Montgomeryshire; the rare migrant plume species Oxyptilus laetus---for a full species list please
click here.
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Yellow Shell
Merrifieldia leucodactyla
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At 4:30pm we decided to call it a day and stated to
pack up and wouldn’t you just know it - in the best manor of most mothing
events there was a moth, on this occasion a Clay, underneath a bit of kit, there’s
always one last moth, isn’t there - somethings never change! To sum up, I think we had a pretty good day, what with the Small Eggar larval nests and the new
county record micro species Oxyptilus laetus.
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| Clay |
Many thanks to those who turned out on a pretty gloomy
day, (those clearwing species are still eluding us), and to Mel for taking the
photos.
Our next event will be at Cors Dyfi Nature Reserve on
Saturday 3rd August, full details can be seen on the events area of
our website.
Peter.
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As a post script to this event it was rather good to hear that two members of our group; Sue Southam and Paul Roughley went back to Llanymynech Rocks the following week and this time they were successful and did indeed manage to lure the six-belted Clearwing to the pheromones. Up to six individuals arrived at any one time - photos below.
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As a post script to this event it was rather good to hear that two members of our group; Sue Southam and Paul Roughley went back to Llanymynech Rocks the following week and this time they were successful and did indeed manage to lure the six-belted Clearwing to the pheromones. Up to six individuals arrived at any one time - photos below.
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Six belted Clearwing at the pheromone
Six-belted Clearwing
Peter
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Bad luck with the clearwings (on a sunny afternoon, six-belted would have arrived within minutes).
ReplyDeleteSounds like the eggar nests and the new plume more than made up for it though.
D
It was all worth while, even before we got a county record. Well done Peter, it was a lovely afternoon.
ReplyDelete