We had a house guest on Sunday which I believe to be a Cork Moth - Nemapogon cloacella, but I would be happy to be corrected if necessary. At about 6mm long, it's a lot easier to study in the photo than in the flesh!
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Monday, 5 May 2014
Cwmllwyd 3/4 May 2014
Didn't do too well on Saturday night: 11 species; only 60 moths, of which 37 were Hebrew Characters! However, we did have our first Great Prominent for several years. Pebble Hook Tip was another FFY.
We had a house guest on Sunday which I believe to be a Cork Moth - Nemapogon cloacella, but I would be happy to be corrected if necessary. At about 6mm long, it's a lot easier to study in the photo than in the flesh!
We had a house guest on Sunday which I believe to be a Cork Moth - Nemapogon cloacella, but I would be happy to be corrected if necessary. At about 6mm long, it's a lot easier to study in the photo than in the flesh!
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Really good photos of the great prominent Steve, and the presumed cork moth must be a good record (I`ll let Sam confirm etc).
ReplyDeleteMy mothing last night (Sunday 4th May) was a flop, as the promised cloudy skies did n`t materialise. A lychnis and two buff tips were FFY at the home trap, but two actinics left near a bog at Llwyn-teg, Llannon had only small numbers of common species, and not the glaucous shears that might have been a possibility. It`s a good site though, and I`ll be focussing on it in 2014. A singing cuckoo and a reeling grasshopper warbler were compensation though.
Nemapogon is a difficult genus and the distinction between N cloacella and N ruricolella (and a few others) is best done using genitalia. Having said that there are 30 records of N cloacella in the database, mostly mine and Jon's and only a handful of those will have been gen det. The white postmedian dot in the wing is enough to point to your moth being either N cloacella or N ruricolella, whilst the wing probably matches the MBGBI description for the former better than the latter. For consistency I'd record it as N cloacella, although there's a slim chance it could be the other species.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your kind comment, Ian - it's appreciated.
ReplyDeleteThanks for wading through Vol.2 of MBGBI, Sam - my old brain atrophies a little more each time I try to comprehend the technicalities of the descriptions contained therein. So I am most grateful for your efforts and happy to record the moth as N. cloacella. For the less intelectually rigorous (that is to say, me), other clues include the fact that N. ruricolella has not been recorded in VC44 and that the illustration of it in MBGBI is nothing like the moth which visited Cwmllwyd! And neither is that displayed on UK Moths. Seriously now, I take the point about ID difficulties and many thanks for taking the time to research this and for your response.
I'm not sure that any real moths resemble the illustrations in MBGBI 1 and 2! They really aren't good for picture matching. Luckily 3 and 4 are stunningly well illustrated.
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