Falkland Palace, 13/02/2015

Good to get the moth trap running again in 2015 - no records for February here before, so anything would be a new 'stake in the ground' for future recording. A nice evening saw a small but nice haul, with 6 moth of 4 species and a Great Diving Beetle.

Of course mothing at this time of the year is unknown to me, so the ID struggle is up and running again! Hopefully I will soon be overlaying last year's learning with some repetition and reinforcement.

Dotted Border

Pale Brindled Beauty

Pale Brindled Beauty

Satellite

Common Quaker?

Great Diving Beetle

From the superb flight times pages of East Scotland Butterfly Conservation - if you want to see a Pale Brindled Beauty, this is the time!

Pale Brindled Beauty, Dunfermline

Returning from a successful Ring-billed Gull twitch at lunchtime I was surprised to find this moth on my office wall. Presumably it had been lured there by the uplights, and I'll need to keep an eye out here apparently. This is also the site of my only encounter with a Vapourer, so apparently I now have an office 'list'!

(Initially I thought this looked like a Peppered Moth, but apart from anything else it's far too small. Then I had it as possibly a Spring Usher, before its true identity was revealed to me)

Falkland Palace, 23/11/2014

Trap left overnight and examined in the morning turned up some nice winter specialities - all therefore new to the Palace and to the hectad, which I assume hasn't been done in November before

The Count
December Moth (1)
Scarce Umber (1)
Mottled Umber (1)
Winter Moth (6)
Epirrita sp. (1)

Hill of Beath, 27th October

Trap out between about 7 and 11, and a sugared post. Couple of craneflies, several flies that looked like Scathophagia stercoraria, inclding a pair in cop.

No moths.

Falkland Palace, 10th October 2014, Hill of Beath 11th

Ran the trap between 19:40 and 21:40, which at times seemed a long shift. There were numerous 'November Moth Types' around the trap and perched in various trees, and besides that a Red-green Carpet settled on the cloth. At half past nine I decided to crack open the trap just to see if I was missing things, and in the middle of the trap, all on its own, was the Black Rustic below. It was the only moth in the trap. I decided to call it a night. In November I will go the whole hog and leave the trap overnight. There just isn't enough action to justify standing around. What there is, though, is a new record for the gardens and for the hectad NO20 - a gap nicely plugged as the species is recorded in almost all other hectads in the county (full sized ones, not bits of coast!)

'November' moth

Black Rustic

Black Rustic

The following night in Hill of Beath I also managed one moth - a Brick

Cullaloe 20/09/2014

With two MVs and the heath trap we still faced an uphill struggle against falling temperatures. A few species were added to the year list though. The brambles above the spillway saw more activity than the traps maybe with Pink-barred Sallows in abundance and also a couple of Red-line Quakers.

Pick of the bunch for me in terms of beauty if not scarcity was Canary-shouldered Thorn

The list
(numbers rough guide, to be corrected)
Canary-shouldered Thorn (2)
Pink-barred Sallow (25)
Sallow (2)
Red-line Quaker (3)
Autumnal Rustic (4)
Snout (1)
Pine Carpet (1)
July High-flyer (1)
November Moth 'type' (1)
Small Square-spot (1)
Chestnut (2)

micros:
Acleris emargana - Notch-wing Tortrix (3)

The pics

There was also a Banded Sexton  Beetle, Nicrophorus investigator, one of the red-antenna'd Nicrophorus. Lots of passengers too, but I'll let them pass on ID this time around.

Falkland Palace, 13/09/2014

Unable to get the electricity on, I resorted to roaming the garden with head-torch and net. The lovely purple Asters produced two Angle Shades