Cors Dyfi Moth Night Event 10 July 2021

 

It was great to finally have a public event – and a fantastic location and good weather too, so everything came together for us to be able to celebrate Moth Night 2021, with the theme of wetlands, in style. 

Photo by Douglas Boyes

    We were excited to see the lovely new centre at Cors Dyfi, with a ready made terrace and benches for us to work from. 

The white sheet looked spectacular from the balcony, and indeed looked pretty good covered in moths later on in the evening.

Photo by Douglas Boyes

We were lucky enough to have Douglas Boyes join us for the evening and lead the event – many thanks to him for making the trip especially for it. Altogether 21 people attended, a mixture of members of the moth group, MWT staff & volunteers and members of the public. The first moths came in on cue as Douglas was doing his introductory talk, and answering some great questions, and kept rolling in until we turned the lights off at 2.30am. We saw impressive numbers of bats about then too....

Some of the frequent fliers of the night were Round-winged Muslin and Rosy Footman, who was an early crowd pleaser. But to be fair we had a lot to keep everyone happy – many moths that members of the group hadn't seen before. It was generally agreed that the Smoky Wave was the star of the night, but that was before the Scallop Shell (the poster moth for the Moth Night) came in, or the Gelechia sororculella (new for site and only the second record in the county since 1998) and even the Double Dart that was lurking in a trap as we packed up.

Gelechia sororculella (photo by Peter Williams)

 It was good to see the public so excited to see the glamour moths – the Elephant Hawk-moth, the Drinker, the Sallow Kitten, and Peter Williams was in his seventh heaven when the Clouded Magpie put in an appearance. One of his favourites apparently. The full list for the night available now – a very impressive total of 109 macros and 37 micros.

Clouded Magpie, photo by Mel Jones

Scallop Shells, photo by Mel Jones