Friday 21 August 2015

Three Generations and a Generator - or Border Patrol with an Old Lady at the Last Post. 20th August 2015

Sheila, Max and myself (3 generations of Dupés) took a generator, microphone MV, Skinner actinic and some sugar to the western border of Monmouthshire, next to the River Rhymney at Parc Tredelerch fishing lake, off Lamby Way, Cardiff. Yes we were in Cardiff, but still in Monmouthshire! Another odd thing is that we had crossed the border, The River Rhymney, 4 times in the journey there!
We'd decided to go at the last minute as the rain was supposed to stop and it was a muggy night. It was already dark when we arrived at 9pm, but the rain did stop just as we were setting up. The moths started to come in quickly - a Smokey Wainscot, Flame Shoulder, Six-striped Rustic soon being joined by a female Oak Eggar.
Checking the sugar we found nothing until the last post, where there was an Old Lady feeding.



By 11pm, it was getting too windy and the moths had stopped coming in so we packed up. Altogether we had 47 moths of 21 species: 2 Smokey Wainscot, 11 Flame Shoulder, 2 Square Spot Rustic, 4 Six-striped Rustic, 1 Oak Eggar, 3 Common Rustic, 2 Setaceaous Hebrew Character, 3 Lesser Broad Bordered Yellow Underwing, 2 Straw Dot, 3 Large Yellow Underwing, 1 Sallow Kitten, 1  Latticed Heath, 1 Old Lady, 2 Drinker (both female), 2 Spectacle, 1 Elephant Hawk, 1 Common White Wave, 2 Shaded Broad Bar, 1 Dark Brocade, 1 Lesser Yellow Underwing and 1 Mother of Pearl. 
This was a scoping exercise to check out the site - I wasn't sure if the car park would be locked at dusk for example. If you do trap there its probably best to trap close to the car park as a group of 4 men turned up as we packed up and they definitely weren't fishermen. I think its a promising site though, with stands of common reed, rank grassland/ruderal habitat and plenty of trees.

2 comments:

  1. Kevin, the records for Oak Eggar & Dark Brocade are very significant in a Cardiff context. The Oak Eggar is the 2nd Cardiff record, the other being on Flat Holm in 1997 & the Dark Brocade is again a 2nd, the first being sometime between 1910-1921 at Whitchurch by Dr Barton-White. Well done.
    There are records for Dusky Sallow & Bulrush Wainscot at this site.

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  2. Thanks for the feed-back Dave. Oak Eggar is fairly common at Newport Wetlands, so I'm not surprised its on the Western Edge of the Gwent Levels. I'll definitely trap here again. The saltmarsh on the Rhymney looks interesting too.

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