National Moth Night at Wordwell

White Admiral

by Douglas Hammersley

White Admiral in these woods. In his lovely book "Butterfly Lives" (pub. Collins, 1947) he writes of visiting "a certain wood near Ipswich" where "when I reached a clearing, where brambles abound, to my amaz.ement I found dozens of these butterflies, many feeding on the nectar in the bramble blossoms, some floating down from the tops of the trees where they had been resting, and others skimming over the tops of the bushes. It seemed as if they could not make too great a success of my first meeting with chem".

National Moth Night at

Wordwell - 9th July

by Tony Prichard

For this year's National Moth Night we decided that attempting to search for the target species was unlikely to provide an interesting night fur any branch members who came along. The site

we have recently started to record at in the

King's Forest, near Wordwell, has produced a good selection of interesting and notable records since we began visiting the site. It was rather disappointing on arrival to find again that no branch members had decided to come along for the event. However, we were joined by John Chainey and Jenny Spence from nearby

Hertfordshire. I also found that we had a bit of

a problem when pulling into the car park as an earth bank had been thrown up blocking the track that we use to access the site. A quick scan of the Ordnance Survey map gave us hope of accessing the area via a more indirect route and after some skilful navigation along forest tracks we managed to arrive at the site.

With just two sets of equipment we decided to cover a couple of areas, including grassland and broad-leaved woodland habitats, between the conifer compartments. Weather conditions were fair and there was plenty of activity around the lights at the start of the evening. Several scarcer species that I would expect to find at a Breckland site, appeared during the evening; Pempeliella dilutel/a, Pyrausta despicata, Royal Mantle, Wood and Four-dotted Footman. A Beautiful Hook-tip was quickly assigned 'moth of the night' status when it came to one of my lights, this appears to be a species chat is rather erratic in appearance in the county, turning up here and there in low numbers.

As midnight came and went activity declined and we decided to call it a night and started clearing up the traps. While we were clearing up my traps John Chainey came up with rather an unexpected species chat they had spotted on the outside of their trap - Cloaked Pug. A very