My day today was taken up mostly with the drive into and back from London, where I was giving a workshop at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music, which is situated in the rather marvellous surroundings of the old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. I did have great views of both buzzard and red kite on the journey, and around the college grounds there were a lot of noisy rose-ringed parakeets.
Brenda writes: “It was such a pleasure today to see my first merveille du jour of the year. Quite apart from the fact that it’s not brown, it is just very beautiful.
I also had two more Clancy’s rustics and another convolvulus hawk. It was sitting very visibly on the yellow house wall so I moved it onto the fence where its camouflage was much more effective.
At the other end of the spectrum, size-wise, was my second new moth today, the very tiny micro carcina quercana – beauty in miniature. Another not so pleasant surprise, although a beautiful moth, was sitting on the side of the trap. Just two days after seeing a normal one near Cambridge there was a dark form box-tree moth in my garden!”
New species for October 2nd:
Moths: carcina quercana, merveille du jour
TOTALS TO DATE:
Birds = 221
Moths = 244
Wildflowers = 286