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Review: Our new toy – a compact portable moth trap

Britain's Wildlife, Reviews, WildWivenhoe

Living in a top floor flat has many advantages – the light, the views, the health benefits of 53 stairs to climb – but it isn’t really compatible with regular moth-trapping. Lack of space means our large Robinson trap is now relegated to the loft space, emerging only on special occasions, and those are restricted to times when we have access to mains electricity or a generator.

A chance meeting in Cambridge Botanic Garden alerted us to new style, truly portable LED traps now available from our friends at Anglian Lepidopterist Supplies. Run off a rechargeable small battery pack, LEDs have been sourced which emit strongly in the UV light spectrum, the frequencies which many moths respond strongly to. This helped overcome our scepticism about LED traps, and we decided to invest.

The trap has now had four outings, so time for a review. Our expectations were managed at the outset with the suggestion it was likely to be most effective in very dark conditions, so we had no high hopes when we ran it in a friend’s urban garden with skyglow, only 10m away, but shaded from, his 125W MV trap light. It was good to see the light still on first thing – the battery had performed to expectations – but compared with the adjacent MV, fewer free-range moths outside the trap. However once inside, it was a very pleasant surprise to find a goodly proportion of the species from the big trap, including a Privet Hawk, three Elephant Hawks, Scarce Footmen, Least Carpets and Brown-tails,

Apart from the greater number, the only things in the big trap which turned us appropriately green with envy was a Green Silver-lines and an L-album Wainscot, and we had several species not in the big one, including Bright-line Brown-eye, Iron Prominent and Latticed Heath, together with the distinctive nose-down micro Pediasia aridella and a Sexton-beetle.

Second outing was close to the Wivenhoe Barrier, overlooking salt-marshes, a generally dark zone but again with distracting intrusion from security lights. Almost instantly the LEDs attracted hundreds of Water Veneers, a short-lived whitish micromoth which emerges in a coordinated way to maximise the chance of meeting and breeding.  Ruby Tiger, Yellow Shell, Diamond-back, Cloaked Minor and Dingy Footman also popped in, along with the mayfly Cloeon dipterum, several caddisflies, and from an entirely different habitat, a Nut Weevil.

Two nights’ later in the same locality, it was a rather different picture. A little cooler, a little breezier, a more lingering twilight, and no emergence of Water Veneers. But again a few moths came in the hour or so of dark we were there, mostly LBJ micros (many being Bryotropha species) with only one different macro, a Rosy Rustic.

Finally, a truly dark location, Wivenhoe Old Cemetery, an old Victorian graveyard which has grown up into woodland, where trapping sadly terminated a bit early because of rain. The attraction was instant, the diversity reasonable, including several Orange Swifts and Straw Underwings, together with micros such as Nephopterix angustella (still considered to be an Essex Red Data species, despite recent increases) and Mint Moth, and the usual variety of hangers’-on, including caddis-flies, Nut Weevils and damsel-bug nymphs.

In a nutshell, this LED trap will never supersede an MV trap for numbers (of individuals or species), but not everyone has the time to process five hundred or more moths in the morning. But with the phasing out of mercury, MV bulbs are on the way out. And the portability (and flatpack storage) of the LED trap means that is likely to be the future of mothing for us.

 

Book Review: The Orphaned Spaces

Reviews

For me it all began in the mid-1970s with the publication of Richard Mabey’s ‘The Unofficial Countryside’. As a naturalist and proto-conservationist, I had grown up fascinated by wildlife in close proximity to humans, in those places without a name apart from ‘wasteland’; at last there was a suitable, non-pejorative name for the places I inhabited as a child, chasing butterflies, building dens, and generally finding my own space.

My fascination with the unofficial countryside has remained unabated. As a professional conservationist one of my proudest achievements was the safeguarding of Canvey Wick (see blog), and the acceptance of what had now become called brownfield or post-industrial land, as having a legitimate part to play in ’proper’ nature conservation.

Forty years on, and there is a new book, introducing a new name – The Orphaned Spaces – written by MW Bewick and illustrated by Ella Johnston. And a new approach, going behind the science and the evident conservation values, into the personal reflections on how such places help mark the passage of time and of our lives. The poetic prose transports me to every orphaned space I have ever been and conjures up the unpredictable magic of the interface between human decay and natural bounty.

Written in diary format, mostly during the winter months, it also succeeds for me in highlighting the role of such places in guiding us through the low season. I am one of those who lives in the shadow of the winter gloom, from autumn equinox until the advancing daylength of January; the improbable pinpricks of nature which adorn our orphaned spaces are essential signposts to a brighter future. This book thus neatly bridges one Mabey theme – Unofficial Countryside – to another – Nature Cure.

The text may seem sparse, but sometimes just a few words can convey meaning which punches above their weight. Take the entry for 24 July:

Travelling thugs on the banks of the river by the derelict furniture warehouse. Giant hogweed and Himalayan balsam are rough brutes. The sewerage pipe trickles into the murk of almost stagnant water and the banks are littered with human detritus. A muddy trainer. Plastic bottles and old tin cans. A jumper. A half-submerged supermarket trolley. Just who is the invasive species?

…thus taking this book into the sphere of natural philosophy, giving voice to some of the questions which need repeating over and over in the modern world of spurious civilisation.

Of course as a scientist and therefore a nit-picker, I have my quibbles. The failure to observe standard typographic representation of scientific names for example. And the assertion of 1 May that ‘There is unique quality to overlooked spaces. More bio-diverse than an arable field.’ – damning with faint praise, to anyone with an ecological background. But such quibbles miss the point of the book…and the fact that I happily read it in one sitting should speak volumes.

And then there’s the subtitle. ‘The Orphaned Spaces: Waste ground explored’. Yes, maybe we called it wasteground as kids, but the adjectival use of ‘waste’, without even ironic quotation marks, upsets me greatly. And I think to anyone who approaches this book with an enquiring mind, you will find its thoughtful contents give the lie to the subtitle.

‘The Orphaned Spaces‘ by MW Bewick & Ella Johnston, publisher Dunlin Press, 2018.

Price £9.99 from Dunlin Press Online Shop.

Also available is a made-to-order boxed set, which should be a thing of beauty as well as a stimulating read.

For more on the wonders of our unofficial countryside, see my blogs on Canvey Wick and Gunnersbury Triangle, and for the delights of post-industrial ‘dereliction’ Orfordness and Wapping Hydraulic Power Station