Moth and bot update

The Blogger analytics figures report that, as of this moment, ND&B has been visited 3,044,462 times. On July 26th alone 20,385 of you clicked on your mice - or pressed your screen - to see what was going on. Nonsense I know. How many of these visitors were genuine human beings? I'll never know. How many were in reality carried out by an automated software programme, also known as a bot? Plenty I'd wager. Good for stats if this blogging lark was purely a numbers game, which as far as I'm concerned it isn't. To be honest it's all beyond me...

Anyway, for those of you who are human I thought I'd do a little round up of the back garden mothing news. Here in Surrey we are still without rain (getting on for 40 days now) and the daily maximum temperatures are above 30C more regularly than are underneath it. The grass is burnt caramel, vegetation wilting. There is no good news here really, although perversely if you are running a moth trap you try and find a silver lining in it all and that silver lining is that the nights are muggy and so should be conducive to recording large numbers of moths to the MV/actinic. Should be. In reality the catches have reduced over the past 10 days and last nights haul was worryingly sparse.

The flurry of migrant activity has quietened down although it is safe to say that the vast numbers of Small Mottled Willows, and substantial arrival of Eastern Bordered Straws and Striped Hawk-moths from back in May have produced a UK-grown generation, with all three species being regularly recorded across the country. Before this year I had recorded just two Small Mottled Willows and now that total numbers 21. My early-June high of two Striped Hawk-moths and a Ni Moth has not - so far - been replicated. The highlight (or lowlight in reality) was the arrival of 41 Oak Processionary moths on the night of 24/25th June, my highest single count but more notable for the three females that were amongst the more numerous (and to be expected) males. I have not recorded a female here before and was quite taken aback at how much larger, diffusely marked and ginger-washed they were. The top picture illustrates this well.

I have been experimenting with the TG7 and am very happy with the results. The following series of Small Mottled Willow images demonstrates just how close in you can get, although once you get to individual scale levels the moth loses its form. The close-up is uncropped.


I have been taking photographs of whatever comes my way, including this fly and spider, neither of which I am attempting to identify. I'm just pleased with the final results, using the magnify/stack setting.


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