Moths in Dartmoor

This season's First Year field trip to Dartmoor featured unprecedented Moth Enthusiasm. I was still staring down the microscopes with keen students at gone eleven pm (beers were at hand, mind).

I found this guide to the features of the different families (drawn up for the Garden Moth Scheme) to be supremely useful in narrowing down our specimens to the right area of the book. I can print one out for you in colour if you ask nicely.

It enabled us to easily spot the group that this species was in, because of its unusually pointy 'nose' - it's a Snout, Hypena proboscidalis. The nose is actually a pair of palps that are held forward.

CC image by Donald Hobern

We also saw the lovely Autographa gamma or 'Silver Y' with its extremely distinctive tufts of hair on its back:

CC image by Donald Hobern

These might look like Just Brown Moths to you, but under the dissecting microscopes they were fascinating in their furriness and the pattern of their scales. It was nice to see their faceted eyes as well.

Whilst using the GMS guide, it also struck me that it's quite important to make a stab at naming them while the moths are still alive and in their natural poses - these help a lot in identification. You can see that the Snout rests with its wings in a flat triangular formation, whereas the Silver Y angles them together like a roof. That's why I think it's such a shame that traditional pinning dictates you spread the wings - the creatures end up looking nothing like their live counterparts. But there we are.