Late Night & Moths at Rainham

Today (01/09/17) there was a late night opening and moth trapping at Rainham Marshes. There were lots of gold finches coming into roost. We heard the ping of a bearded tit near the numbers, whilst walking round and had a nice view of a hobby sitting on a post.

At the moth trapping we caught a huge old lady moth, which was hard to catch. The people were amazed how big it was as it was a similar size to a hawk moth. We caught a few thorns (dusky and august), but you can also get canary shoulder but we did not get one this evening.

The most common moths that we caught were brimstone and setaceous hebrew characters. The brimstones were coming in every few minutes and were bright yellow. We had a few moths going on the wire connected to the bulb, one was an interesting orange swift and a few snouts as well. Some of the snouts had their snouts half missing. There was some large and lesser yellow underwings, when they opened their wings you could see the yellow hindwing.

Closer to the end we caught more willow beauties and a plume moth. The plume moth did not look like a moth it looked more like a giant white gnat but more T shaped. There were also lots of pugs which are hard to identify, we did manage to identify one as a slender pug. We also a caught a clay and a light brown apple moth. There is another late night opening with moths next Friday, I wonder what we will find.

Below are some photos from the evening.

Pug