Moth Trap Mark III

On Monday night when Steve caught a large number of moths, I had my trap set up on my back garden and caught FOUR moths and they were ALL Dark Arches. Rubbish or what? So I got to thinking...What if I could make some improvements to my trap. Whilst watching it in action I'd noticed a lot of moths approach, circle around the bulb a bit and then fly off, I thought 'what I need are some vanes on the top for the hapless creatures to crash into, yes, that'll get 'em in!' So on Wednesday I set to work, and with two plastic seed tray lids, some glue, a pair of scissors and some sticky back plastic, I conjured up this masterpiece of precision engineering.

Ta-dah!! The new improved trap?

To test it out properly I took it over to Bun's again, ( seems it's just too breezy at my house all the time) Did it work? Yep, like a dream! This morning it'd caught 111 moths! There were 50 species, 14 of which were new to the garden. The new ones were: Barred Straw, Purple Thorn, Common Carpet, Garden Carpet, Grey Pine Carpet, Yellow Tail, Mother of Pearl, Knot Grass, Purple Bar, Pebble Prominent, Ghost Moth, Small Waved Umber, Maiden's Blush and an unknown species. Also notable was a total count of eight Rosy Footmen and there were also 3 Orange 16 spot Ladybirds (for some reason).

I didn't manage to get good photographs of all the new ones, so I'll just put a few photos on of ones that just 'took my fancy' :-)

A Willow Beauty, showing it's fine camouflage.

This Small Waved Umber is well camouflaged too, but not on this wood!


I put a Small Phoenix on my last post, but this one landed on a yellow torch and the resulting photo looks smart. I think the background colours are ideal for a moth called a Phoenix.


Pebble Prominent, this one had a really furry face....

... and legs. Like so.

The Knot Grass

The very delicate, Mother of Pearl.

Purple Thorn

Ghost Moth

My favourite moth of this morning's catch
was this beautiful little one called The Maiden's Blush.

This Black Arches had the most spectacular set of antennae,
I just had to get a close up!

I couldn't ID this nice little mostly green one.
It was very small (wing length about10- 12 mm) so probably a Minor.?

Yesterday I got my first Small Tortoiseshell photo of the year, lovely!
Shame about the cowpat background!