Reading & District Natural History Society

When opening a moth trap that has run the previous night you can never be sure what lies within. There are mornings when you know immediately that the catch will be poor. Otherwise there is always a sense of anticipation, maybe this will be the day you find something totally unexpected. Maybe there will be a spectacular moth in mint condition. Maybe there will be an extreme rarity lurking below. Is it just possible there will be a moth that is all these things?

Imagine the Cholsey scene, it is early morning on 17th August. I stare in disbelief at what sits on the egg boxes. It is very early, maybe I imagine the whole thing. No it is true - there really are two pristine Spurge Hawkmoths staring up at me! I need an expert authoritive witness, so closing the trap quickly I await the arrival of Richard Lewington.

Many photographs later we wade through the rest of the trap but find nothing else of special note. Berkshire County Moth Recorder, Martin Harvey confirms that we have a first ever record for the county.

The three of us are searching for an explanation, no other records seem to be coming in nationwide. Then we recall that somewhere in the village lives an entomologist who specialises in hawkmoths. Richard contacts him and back comes the explanation that he accidentally released three Spurge Hawkmoths on August 16th. What a shame that the county’s non record for this species remains intact.
The following night I very unusually put out TWO traps and urge Alan Strange, a villager new to moth-ing to put out his trap. Maybe we will catch something special. To my disappointment my traps contain nothing of note. Then just after mid-day there is a very excited Alan on the phone. He has belatedly opened up his trap and found - yes a Spurge Hawkmoth. Photographs are examined later and Richard pronounces the latest specimen to be a different individual and not one of those caught previously. Not a great surprise given that Alan lives over a third of a mile away from Red Cow Cottage where my traps are. We mark Alan’s specimen before release with nail varnish so we can recognise it again.

Remarkable that we appear to have caught all the releases despite being some distance from the entomologist’s patch.
The stop press news is that on opening my trap on the morning of August 21st there was another Spurge Hawkmoth! Close examination suggests this was one of those seen on the 17th. This time the moth was marked, and now we have three moth-ers dotted around the village watching their traps very carefully for further developments.

Who says moths are dull!

Tony Rayner

These amazing moths first appeared in numbers on 30th July. Thereafter we have seen at least one daily. It soon became apparent that not only were the potted geraniums outside the cottage being visited on a regular basis, but that one could be found quite easily at rest on our barn wall. In overcast conditions one moth could be found during the day, looking incidentally nothing like the hummingbird we all know when nectaring on flowers. It seems too that this day-flying jewel probably goes to roost at night, certainly on one occasion it was found at dawn in exactly the same position as it was seen the previous dusk.

From all this it appears that one individual has adopted our site as its base. This makes some sense considering that its larval food plant is Ladies Bedstraw and Hedge Bedstraw. Sufficient to say that our three acre meadow is full of Ladies Bedstraw and there is plenty of Hedge Bedstraw too.

Tony & Ro Rayner 7/8/2010

Graham Saunders reports seeing Bombus hypnorum on Blackcurrant in his Pamber Heath garden on 26th April.

This morning Tony Rayner stepped outside his house in Cholsey and caught a glimpse of something that looked familiar. Then from around a roof top a Swallow shot over his head, moving north! He phoned Brian Shaw at Withymead and apparently he had seen 3 Swallows yesteday, so it isn’t a one-off … they really are starting to arrive! This is much earlier than in previous years.

Other than that, signs of Spring seem to be few and far between around my area of Tilehurst. The Snowdrops are still in flower in some places (quite late), male Brimstones have been cropping up and last week on a sunny walk along the river near the Madjeski statium I saw a rather cold looking Small Tortoishell. Queen bumblebees are relatively frequent on sunny days in my garden but the big question is - what are they finding to eat? Because there are very few flowers out at the moment and, for the birds, there are even fewer insects.

Tony Rayner, in Cholsey, just reported to me that they have had a flock of Common Redpoll in their garden for the last 16 days and it is growing in numbers each week. Currently they have 9 birds at any one time on the seed feeders outside their kitchen. In addition Tony thinks that he might also have seen 1 Mealy Redpoll, a very unusual species usually found in northern, Arctic regions.

This comes at the same time that the warden of Withymead Nature Reserve, in Goring/South Stoke has reported netting 25 Common Redpoll and possibly 2 Mealy Redpoll in with them. I too have had a more modest influx of 4 Redpoll regularly coming to the Niger Seed feeders in my garden of the last week or more and a single male Brambling passed through on one day last week.

These unusual winter visitors have undoubtably been forced to seek shelter here by the unusually long, hard winter in Scandinavia and Northern Europe this year. The easterly winds, which we all felt over the last 2 months and that brought snow to many regions, probably helped these birds to find our shores.

Just another reason, if we needed one, to make sure that our bird feeders are topped up and primed with a good variety of bird foods. I have noticed that Redpolls are very similar to Gold Finches in their fondness for the small, black Niger Seeds … whilst the Chaffinches, Green Finches, Tits, Robins and Blackcap prefer to eat Sunflower Hearts

by James Wearn

Location: Fallen dead branch of Acer pseudoplatanus, Withymead Nature Reserve, near Goring, Oxfordshire, 27 July 2009
Collector: Dr J.A. Wearn
Identified by: Dr J.A. Wearn & Dr B. Aguirre-Hudson (Kew)
Voucher specimen: Herb. J.A. Wearn, Wearn F064 (duplicate to be deposited at Kew)

This is a particularly interesting record of a scarce fungus and is a first for Oxfordshire.  I have trawled all the records and spoken to all the likely recorders for the region and have not discovered any previous records for Massaria inquinans in Oxfordshire (and I have checked synonyms too).  It has small black fruit bodies on dead Acer wood so is overlooked by most people.  It was certainly worth getting down on my hands and knees with my lens!

On the 2nd June 2009 I was pottering about in the garden when I noticed an unusual bumblebee nectaring on the Geraniums. It was obviously different from all other bumbles because it had the completely ginger-haired thorax of something like the Common Carder bee (Bombus pasuorum) but instead of having a ginger or blackish abdomen the abdomen was jet black with a starkly contrasting white tail.

A quick text to a Matt Smith, an entomologist friend, confirmed my initial thoughts - Bombus hypnorum, a recent addition to the British list from the continent. Matt had a record from the Reading area already but it is a species that is just starting to appear in our area so it is still pretty rare.

I don’t have any photos - it flew away before I could grab my camera - but if you follow this BWARS link you should get some pictures of this species. Hopefully my bumble is nesting nearby and I will get some photos later in the year!

During the Society’s visit to Dry Sandford Pit (a nature reserve near Abingdon belonging to the Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust) on Sunday 31^st May 2009, a small orange moth was found on a clump of Common Bird’s-foot Trefoil. It has been identified by Martin Harvey, the County Moth Recorder, as Rannoch Looper Itame brunneata. This is the first specimen of Rannoch Looper to be recorded in VC22 Berkshire. Britain has a small resident population of these moths in central Scotland, but the Dry Sandford individual is likely to be a migrant from mainland Europe, brought in by the recent north-easterly winds. Since the first Rannoch Looper was found on the Reading and District Natural History Society field trip, further specimens have been seen in Wokingham and Windsor Great Park.

Member John Notton first reported seeing Painted Lady butterflies passing through his Caversham garden late in the morning on Sunday 24^th May. A timed count in the Berkshire Downs near Compton on Monday 25^th May gave 50 Painted Ladies in five minutes and a massive 224 were seen on a 2-mile walk round the village. Almost all were flying fast in a north-westerly direction. Strong winds later in the week grounded some of the butterflies, and they were observed to be nectaring on various flowers, including Pyracantha, bramble and Hemlock Water Dropwort.

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EDIT (ChrisR): I’d just like to echo what Jan said above and add that my parents, who were RDNHS members but who have moved to Beaminster in Dorset, reported seeing hundreds of Painted Lady on Saturday 23rd all flying north and away from the coast. In addition, I have seen unusually large numbers of day-flying Silver-Y moths, which I also assume were migrants that rode the same migration winds that brought so many Painted Lady to our shores.

Yet again Tony Rayner’s little patch up in Cholsey has yeilded a huge number of reptiles. Today Tony reports that he counted 84 slow-worms under his 34 tin sheets, amongst the usual smattering of Grass Snakes and Common Lizards. This really is an exceptional number for one day’s count - is anyone else finding similar numbers elsewhere?