I've thought long and hard about buying a moth trap and, in the end, the decision was taken entirely out of my hands thanks to the limitless generosity of my dear friend Harold Dobson who, when he read about the trap, offered to buy it for me as a joint birthday and Christmas present this year. It's certainly a precious and much appreciated gift.
The trap is a Gladiator made by Paul Batty of Sheffield (whose contact details are included in the link). I can thoroughly recommend Paul to you if you are thinking of buying a trap. His advice and customer support is second to none and the Gladiator is a small miracle of simplicity and inventive design. Here it is working in my garden last night, complete with its rain guard ...
And before I move on to the moths, one other person needs to be thanked. Stewart Sexton, the Boulmer Birder, has received and responded to all of my questions and concerns about moth trapping with great patience and his excellent advice and encouragement helped me decide to go ahead with this new interest.
The slogan for moth trappers could well be build it and they will come (with apologies to the writers of Field of Dreams for substituting 'He' with 'they'). That's all I had to do: plug the trap into a timer and leave it to switch itself off at 3.30am while I was asleep and dreaming about moths ... at least I should have been asleep but the child-like excitement of having already captured an Elephant Hawkmoth before I went to bed rather kept me awake. This was one of my wish-list species so you might imagine how excited I was ...
Altogether I trapped about thirty different species, many of which were micro moths, or certainly very small macro moths, which I've not been able to identify. Here are three more of the macro moths trapped; more in the next post ...
