Grayling

 

After last weeks negative results from our search for Grayling butterflies, Wednesday left us with a choice to make, a return visit to Windover Hill or go looking for Purple Emperors. There wasn't really any choice, the Grayling are a much more interesting target. It is a butterfly that is just hanging on in Sussex and each year we return there is a real fear that it will be gone.

The walk up the hill gave us a good selection of butterflies with a lot more Chalkhill Blues on show than last time although still not in the numbers we had seen some years.

Chalkhill Blue

Still hundreds and probably thousands of the nationally rare Yellow Pearl moth and one I forgot to mention in the last blog, sightings of the Forester moth on both visits although only one specimen on each day.

Yellow Pearl - Mecyna flavalis

Forester Moth - Adscita statices

and Six-spot Burnets now in good numbers

Six-spot Burnet

Reaching the top of the hill we crossed over into Deep Dean. We have two strategies for the search. The first and certainly the easiest on a hot day is to sit at the top of the slope and scan for Grayling flying up to intercept any other butterfly passing through their territory. It usually works but not today. The second is to walk up and down the slope looking for the cryptically camouflaged and hard to spot butterfly in each of the scrapes on the hill. It sometimes works but again not today and it was certainly a lot harder work in the midday heat.

We did see a couple of possibles flying. They always remind me of Kestrels. They hang in the wind appearing to be stationary then drop one wing and shoot off down the hill at speed and with no wing flapping. A good possibility it might have been but it was a long way down and the butterfly would not be easy to find to confirm the sighting.

We had lunch and watched for a bit longer but were really ready to head for home. Fortunately we spotted Patrick Moore heading up the hill on his transect. We had spoken to him the week before when he had also drawn a blank. We expected the same response this time but he had seen about a dozen in the bushes at the top of the hill.

You learn something every day, this is not a place we would have looked for the Grayling. Better still, when we walked back up the hill Patrick picked one out from about 20 yards away, a remarkable spot given the jumble of undergrowth there.

 

We saw three, possibly four Grayling and Patrick had a dozen. It's not many but at least they are still hanging on and we can look forward to seeing them again next year.

Silver-studded Blue

Time to catch up on some of the late season butterflies and also a few of the earlier ones that I had not recorded. This sudden return of enthusiasm being triggered by the hot weather and the realisation that I was about to time out on the Silver-studded Blue.

It has been a funny year for the butterflies. Poor numbers of the early season species and now what appears to be large numbers of a lot of the later species. On top of that some species seem to be late emerging whilst others are around there normal time.

We usually see the Silver-studded Blues at Iping Common in the last two weeks of June. This year it was us that were late, rather than the butterfly, looking for them in the second week of July. There were still plenty flying but most were past their best so I guess these had emerged on their usual timescales.

Female Silver-studded Blue

Male Silver-studded Blue

Male with silver studs just about showing

We also took a trip over to Windover Hill on the 14th July to see the Chalkhill Blues and to look for Grayling. We had regularly seen good numbers of fresh Chalkhills on this date in previous years and occasionally a Grayling or two. This year the Chalkhills were out but only in small numbers and there was no sign of Grayling. However the nationally rare Yellow Pearl Moth with a flight season of Mid July to August was out in huge numbers. In places it was difficult to put your foot down without treading on them.

Chalkhill Blue

Yellow Pearl Moth - Mecyna flavalis

A couple of days out butterflying also filled a few gaps in my sightings earlier in the year. We were perhaps a bit late for finding fresh Dark Green Fritillaries to photograph but we did at least see lots of them whilst we were out, probably in bigger numbers than I have seen for many years.

Dark Green Fritillary

Photographs of the Dark Greens and the Silver-washed Fritillaries are always difficult unless you can find them nectaring towards the end of the day.

Silver-washed Fritillary

We also saw our first Gatekeeper of the year. This sighting being much later than we would normally have found it.

Gatekeeper

July is also the time to look for Essex Skippers. They emerge a couple of weeks after the Small Skippers and the two species look very similar. It takes a bit of effort to be sure you are looking at an Essex with the best differentiator being the underside of the antenna. These should be black on the Essex and orange/brown on the Small.

Female Skipper probably a Small

and an Essex showing the black undersides to the antenna

A few other Butterflies spotted whilst we were out.

Marbled White

Painted Lady

Red Admiral

We also saw a good number of White Admirals around Houghton Forest but the only one we found puddling on the ground was well past it's best and I will spare you the photograph.

Comma

This Comma being the form Hutchinsoni. These usually develop when the caterpillars are exposed to long periods of sunlight. Did we have that earlier this year? I think the normal form is a much more impressive butterfly.

Large Skipper

Plenty of Peacock's seen but perhaps more unusual, a Peacock Caterpillar

Peacock Caterpillar

and to finish, a Ringlet......

Ringlet

and a White-letter Hairstreak. Perhaps not the best picture I have taken of the White-letter but it is the only one we saw and then only for a few seconds whilst silhouetted against the sun.

White-letter Hairstreak

Still a few butterflies to see before the end of the year and I am still keeping my fingers crossed for a Large Tortoiseshell. There is still time!

 

Micro Moths

I am still putting the moth trap out on suitable "mothing" evenings. Numbers recovered vary from say ten to about thirty each night. No hawkmoths yet but I have had a few other nice specimens. The most common capture are always the Noctuidae family. They all count but this family is like the warblers of the birding world. A lot of them look very similar and I am spending hours trying to identify them.

There are always a few micro moths in the box each morning. You tend to ignore them at first but then you start to note some interesting specimens. This Olive-tree Pearl had the looks to be impressive. Big for a micro moth, at 26mm wingspan, but translucent and looking very delicate. Then you read that it is an immigrant and is not known to have bred in the wild in this country. Delicate it may be but that means that it has survived a sea crossing of more than twenty miles. Southerly winds would help the migration but a strong wind would probably tear it apart.

Olive-tree Pearl - Palpita vitrealis

The Twenty-plume Moth is the only member of the Alucitidae family in Britain. Each wing is divided into six plumes so it should really be called a Twenty Four-plume moth. The scientific name meaning six fingered is probably more accurate.

Twenty-plume Moth -  Alucita hexadactyla

The Apple Leaf Skeletoniser does what it's name suggests, the caterpillar eats the leaf material and leaves the skelton of the leaf behind. I was a bit worried when I found a couple of these in the trap. The apple tree has been looking a bit the worse for wear recently but reading up on them, the preferred food source is the Crab Apple.

Apple Leaf Skeletoniser - Choreutis pariana

And another apple tree pest, the Codling Moth. I have also had a lot of the Light Brown Apple Moth in the trap. Still it makes a change from the Woolly Aphids that Sue attacks with soapy water and a scrubbing brush every year.

Codling Moth - Cydia pomonella

Plume Moths. I hadn't realised how many different types there were. I am having to pay a bit more attention to them now.

Common Plume Moth - Emmelina monodactyl

Beautiful Plume - Amblyptilia acanthadactyla

Three more from the Tortricidae family, the Bramble Shoot Moth, the Common Mable, and another Cydia, the Marbled Piercer.

Bramble Shoot Moth - Notocelia uddmanniana

Common Marble - Celypha lacunana

Marbled Piercer - Cydia splendana

It seems to me, from my brief foray into mothing, that identification techniques are completely different to those used for butterflies. For butterflies I look for colour and flight style, with moths it is the shape of the silhouette and the wing pattern. The silhouette gets me to the right part of the field guide and the pattern of markings on the wing usually gets me to the correct identification. Colour only seems to confuse.

But there are always exceptions. Rolled wings or wings tightly held against the body and the colour becomes more important.

Golden Argent - Argyresthia goedartella

I had always thought that there was only one ermine moth but now I find there is a whole group of Small Ermine. I would have called the one below the Orchard Ermine Yponomeuta padella but the field guide warns of problems with identification of individual moths within the group.

And I would have got it wrong. Confirmed as Spindle Ermine by Colin Pratt 16/10/2020.

Spindle Ermine - Yponomeuta cagnagella

Mint moths making the most of their time in the moth trap.

Mint Moth - Pyrausta aurata

My first Blastobasidae, or at least the first that I have gotten round to identifying, the Dingy Dowd.

Over confident here. Probably not a Dingy Dowd. I should have taken a side on view for confirmation.

Dingy Dowd - Blastobasis adustella ????

 

The Micro Moths Field Guide has also come in useful for identifying some old pictures.The shot below was taken a few years ago but with the faded wing markings I wasn't really sure. It went into my work in progress file, which is just one step short of - delete as its taking up too much time.

It's nice to be able to recover one and put a name to it.

Mother of Pearl - Pleuroptya ruralis

To finish I thought I would include a picture of a Yellow Pearl. Unfortunately it's not from the moth trap in the back garden. It was found whilst searching for Grayling on Windover Hill in 2014. It is apparently a rare moth for Sussex but at the time there was a small colony reported in the area.

Yellow Pearl - Mecyna flavis

I was disappointed to see that my field guide does not include many of the old English names for these moths. They can be confusing and many have multiple names from different parts of the country. The scientific names are less confusing, though difficult to remember and to spell,  but it seems to me that the old names somehow give these tiny moths more character and makes them more interesting. 

Fortunately the names can still be found via the internet.

Grayling

Butterflying has one big advantage over birding, if you do your research and get your timing right the butterflies will be there. That doesn't always happen with the birds. I think our only real failure this year has been in searching for Small Pearl-bordered Fritillaries in Sussex where three trips to Park Corner Heath have left me without a result.

Monday saw us out again, this time at Windover Hill looking for Grayling. I didn't really know what to expect. I had never seen a Grayling before and their cryptic camouflage is supposed to make them difficult to find. That was the case when we first arrived on the hill. We found Marbled Whites, Wall, and Small Coppers, along with the usual suspects but no Grayling.

Rather tatty Wall on a cow pat 

This one in better condition but not giving open wing shots

Whilst searching for the Grayling we also found a few moths including a freshly emerged Oak Egger and a Yellow Pearl mecyna flavalis. The latter is a rarity in Sussex although it seems quiet common on Windover Hill where there is reported to be a colony of them.

Oak Egger - freshly emerges and still blowing up its wings

Oak Egger

Yellow Pearl mecyna flavalis

This was our first visit to Windover Hill. It looks to be a great site for butterflies but we were beginning to think that we had come a week too early. Fortunately Dave had wandered off in pursuit of a Small Copper and I was soon chasing after him when he found our first Grayling of the day. There was the usual scramble to make sure we both had a record shot but then when we looked around it was clear that there were a good number flying. We counted five in the air at the same time but that was just in the one small location. Over the side of the hill there must have been at least twenty.

Grayling showing cryptic camouflage

 The Grayling tended to land on bare earth and broken rock where the camouflage was very effective but this did not make for a good picture. In fact it proved very difficult to get any distance between the Grayling and its background. An out of focus plain green background would have shown the detail much more effectively but I guess you can't have everything - at least not this time.

The eye pops up as a defence response

They nearly always settle with the wings closed

Then just as we were starting to get a bit bored we came across a mating pair and a few more pictures were taken.

Mating pair

Tuesday and we were hoping to repeat our success by finding a Silver-spotted Skipper. This was another new location, Newtimber Hill, and for me another new butterfly. The search was a partial success. Dave found the skipper and managed to take a photograph. I did get to see it but just as I pressed the shutter button for my record shot it took off. It moved with surprising speed for a Skipper, we didn't see it go and we could not relocate it despite a couple of hours of looking. So if you want to see a picture of the Silver-spotted Skipper you will have to look at Dave's blog site.                                                                          

We had regular visits from a Small Copper whilst we were looking. This was showing blue spots on its rear wings and is of the form caeruleopunctata  or should it be referred to as an ab. caeruleopunctata?   The books do not seem to be clear on the difference between an aberration (ab) and a "form". At the moment I am taking it that they are both caused by the same triggers but an aberration is a variation that is a rarity whilst a form is a variation that is consistent and common.   If you are interested read more about it here.                                                                                                                    

                                                                     

Small Copper ab. caeruleopunctata

Small Copper

Peacock

We made a quick trip to Chantry Hill in the afternoon. There were a lot of Dark Green Fritillaries  on the track between the car park and the hill but most of these were in poor condition. There were also a good number of Marbled Whites and these looked surprisingly fresh.

It was a hot day and I was beginning to feel tired but then I spotted a pair of mating Dark Green Fritillaries. I only managed one quick shot before they took off and disappeared down the hill.

Mating Dark Green Fritillaries

There was clearly a good shot to be had here and I was quickly off in pursuit. I did manage to catch up once about half way down the hill but they were flying again almost as soon as I got to them. By the time I got to the bottom of the hill they had disappeared altogether. It was only then that it dawned on me that I had to climb all the way back up and it's a big hill. Butterflying can be hard work.