There has been a lot of excitement in my garden the last couple of nights. Firstly on the night of 25th September I put both traps out since the forecast of southerly winds and the number of American land birds in West Wales meant conditions for migrants looked very promising. On inspecting the contents of the traps the following mining my attention was drawn towards a small Tortrix-type moth which I could not initially identify, so I immediately took arevord shot with my phone, but unfortunately the moth escaped as I attempted to capture it. On checking it out in my moth books nothing like it could be found, the closest to it being Clepsis ruminana which is very rare in Britain with RDB1 status, and the flight-time meant it was probably too late for it, so I tweeted the record shot to our micro moth recorder Sam Bosanquet who was also flummoxed, what could it be?
I then posted on Steve Nash's Migramt Lepidoptera Facebook group as that includes some national and international expert contributers, where upon a Danish expert Knud Larsen said that it was probably Clepsis peritana which is not in the literature but other contributors concurred, there being a first UK record of the moth in Newcastle-under-Lyme on 33rd July 2023, and another record in Essex in early August, so mine could be the 3rd record in UK, and first for Wales!!
Because of this I put both traps out again last night with the unlikely expectation of trapping the specimen again - faint hope I thought but you can only try... Well! This morning the said micro moth was there in the trap and much more confiding! So now I have good photos of the first specimen of Clepsis peritana recorded in Wales.
Well done Kevin!
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