Fri 27/09/2019

A bit of a strange thing happened as I was walking to work in the semi-darkness this morning. Not long after 6:30am, I spotted an insect crawling across the pavement in front of me. I stopped and it stopped too; I gave it a prod with my foot, but it wouldn’t start moving again. There was a lot of autumn leaf detritus spread around, but I was sure I had seen this particular dot moving; it was too dark to see what it was, so I crouched down and took a couple of flash photos of it. I thought it might be some kind of bee or something. When I was able to check the photos, I found out it was a moth, and I’m pretty sure it’s one I haven’t seen before, too:

I have left a sycamore seed in the photograph for scale, and I believe this moth to be a lunar underwing Omphaloscelis lunosa, which is a new species for me! It gets the name from a crescent-moon shaped marking on the underwings, not visible in this photograph of course.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, there has been a massive irruption of box tree moths this year – but these are virtually the most shy and easily-spooked moths I have ever come across. Usually they see you coming even before you see them, and any roosting specimens that are close enough to photograph take off and flutter away before you can even get your camera out. They don’t settle back down quickly either, and tend to meander away or up and over the roof. I have managed to get some fairly distant photos, but even then it tends to fail because the high contrast of their bright white wings with the dark borders tends to mess up the light metering, and all you get is a flat, glowing expanse of white, (as with my photo from Fri 13/09/19). But today it was quite chilly, and this one let me get close – really close. I had to take shots in between gusts of wind (that regularly disturbed the creatures wings), but I got some decent shots at last.

It is an invasive species from East Asia, introduced to Europe in 2006 when they started being spotted in Germany, and invading the UK two years later. However, this is the first year they have been really noticeable and common.