Parc Slip

Despite the heavy rain, I had the most productive trap of the year so far at Parc Slip last night - 41 moths of 12 species with highlights being pine beauty (always nice to see), grey shoulder-knot and shoulder stripe. Other than that it was the usual spring fare of quakers, clouded drab, hebrew character, march moth, mottled umber and early grey. An Agonopterix heracliana/ciliella was the solitary micro.

Coed Garnllwyd

Rob and Linda Nottage and I found this pupal case (I presume) at Coed Garnllwyd near Llancarfan last week (and another on the same tree this week) - anyone have any ideas as to what might have emerged from it??

Parc tir iarll, Llangynwyd 13/3/18

                              Oak beauty

                               Early grey

                              Clouded drab

                              Dotted border

                               Grey shoulder knot.
                               11 sp in all, with Common and Small quakers the most
                               numerous. 10 sp new for the site.

Bactra robustana

I recently dissected a Bactra which was trapped at Merthyr Mawr on 22/8/17. It looked a decent shout for B. robustana, a saltmarsh species, but I struggled to make sense of the genitalia preparation and so posted some photos on the Moth Dissection Facebook group. Raymond Watson quickly replied to say it was indeed robustana and gave a detailed summary of the clinching features.

 

This would appear to be the most easterly VC41 record though my MapMate probably isn't quite up to date.

Creigiau - 19 February

The forecast was for a warm-ish night, but the sky stayed clear and the temperature dropped to 4.9C from 8C at midnight.
Six moths in/around the trap - a couple of Chestnut that had seen better days, a couple of March Moth, Oak Beauty (3 weeks earlier than last year) and Pale Brindled Beauty.

March Moth

Oak Beauty

Pale Brindled Beauty

Bankesia II

And within a day of being brought inside, a female had emerged. Being female I'm still not 100% certain on the ID, but it is another step in the right direction!

Bankesia conspurcatella

Back in 2004 I found a larval case at Radyr train station that I tentatively identified as the Psychid Bankesia conspurcatella. At the time it would have been new to Wales, and the various experts that I showed it to were not sufficiently familiar with the case to be able to confirm it without an adult male. In January and February 2005, I found winged males of this species in Gabalfa, adding some weight to my identification of the Radyr case, but it could still only really be considered an unconfirmed records. There have been no further records in Wales (to my knowledge) of this species.

Yesterday, on a SEWBReC outing to Forest farm I was able to spend a fair amount of time around searching the area around the original location and eventually found some cases that match that original 2004 case. All four cases were on or around the footbridge that crosses the Taff between the station and Forest Farm.

The literature suggests that they should be pupae at this time of year, with the adults emerging in the next few weeks - but my Gabalfa records suggest that the flight period is already over so I'm not confident that I'll get any adults from the cases I collected, but you never know. I am 99% certain that they are Bankesia, but it would be good to get that confirmation!

The cases are not very photogenic, but if anything does emerge I will post something here!