Welcome

Hello and welcome to my moth Blog. I now reside in a small village in East Cambridgeshire called Fordham. My Blog's aim is to promote and encourage others to participate in the wonderful hobby that is Moth-trapping.
Moth records are vital for building a picture of our ecosystem around us, as they really are the bottom of the food chain. They are an excellent early indicator of how healthy a habitat is. I openly encourage people to share their findings via social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter & Instagram.
So why do we do it? well for some people it is to get an insight into the world of Moths, for others it is to build a list of species much like 'Twitching' in the Bird world. The reason I do it....you just never know what you might find when you open up that trap! I hope to show what different species inhabit Cambridgeshire and neighbouring counties.
On this Blog you will find up-to-date records and pictures.
I run a trap regularly in my garden and also enjoy doing field trips to various localities over several different counties.
Please also check out the links in the sidebar to the right for other people's Blogs and informative Websites.
Thanks for looking and happy Mothing!

KEY

NFY = New Species For The Year
NFG = New Species For The Garden
NEW! = New Species For My Records

Any Species highlighted in RED signifies a totally new species for my records.

If you have any questions or enquiries then please feel free to email me
Contact Email : bensale@rocketmail.com

My Latest Notables and Rarities

Monday 27 May 2013

Herts Moth Group meeting - Ashridge Estate - 25/05/13

The evening party assembled as planned at the Ivinghoe Beacon car park. It was almost immediately agreed that the air temperature was far too low for any trapping in this area – in spite of the theoretical possibility of catching Wood Tiger and/or Light Feathered Rustic. However, having come all this way we felt that we ought to do something, so we drove to the Bridgewater Monument on the Ashridge Estate about a mile down the road and split into two camps within the (theoretically warmer) woodland. We set up 6 lights (a sheet on the side of the Landrover plus five traps) on the Hertfordshire side of a ditch whilst the chaps (and one chap-ess) from Buckinghamshire ran a further three lights on the other side of the ditch in their own county – a couple of hundred yards away.
 
The intended inter-county competition was largely forgotten as both teams considered it increasingly likely that the most probable result would be a “no score” draw, but eventually a moth did appear to set the ball rolling. The 9 lights ran from about 21.30 to midnight, but in the last hour, perhaps the last hour and a half, the moths stopped flying altogether as the temperature plummeted to a depressing 7 degrees Celsius (an interesting situation, given that we were a mere 29 days from mid-summer and only 26 days off the longest day of the year!). We eventually managed 10 macros and a micro – with a grand overall total of 22 individual moths in our 6 Hertfordshire lights. Two traps had absolutely zero moths. The Buckinghamshire crew scarcely did better; one of their traps also scored a duck, though they did get a Brimstone moth, which we did not. Words such as “dire” do not adequately convey the situation.  Can it possibly get any worse? Is this the future of mothing as we know it?
 
The Hertfordshire list was as follows:


Macro Moths

1x Frosted Green
1x Water Carpet
2x Small Phoenix
2x Common Pug
1x Brindled Pug
1x Purple Thorn 
5x White-pinion Spotted
1x Coxcomb Prominent
1x Common Quaker
2x Nut-tree Tussock

Micro Moths

5x Nematopogon swammerdamella


Frosted Green










Nematopogon swammerdamella










Abax parallelepipedus
Posted by Bennyboymothman at 18:28

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