best part of the day: emperors!

7th April. Luring emperor moths is a great opportunity to see these fascinating moths close up. In fact they are so flighty and excitable it is practically the only way to see them and get photos. However as it involves distracting them from their only mission in life (finding a female and mating) it could be seen as slightly harmful to them and so I only do it once or twice in the season and never in the same area.

The last couple of years I have had success near Bonaly and since it is the easiest point of the Pentlands to arrive at from my home and there is a minimum of hiking, carrying all the gear, I opted for it again this year. I had my camera in my backpack as usual and all the luring and trapping gear in a Lidl coolbag which I also carried. Both of these fitted into my bike pannier bags along with padlocks, sandwiches and juice. I cycled the lot up to the car park at Bonaly and then another eighty yards into the woods where I padlock my bike to a fence, out of sight. Not that there are many neds in the Pentlands, but I've never lost a bike yet. Which would suggest it works. Or is over-cautious. I don't mind which.

bee-fly
I can't remember ever seeing so many as this year.

Torduff Hill

Rather than head up the hill towards Bonaly reservoir I go through the woods on the right and over towards Torduff. On the way I collected a couple of pieces of bark and wood to have for backgrounds. The luring process has been so successful in the past here, that I don't doubt that it will definitely come good today. Which I review after I get out the lure and press the stopwatch on my wrist. In the past it has taken seconds to get the attention of the local moths here and I have ended up having to hide the lure as I have been inundated.

Today, five full minutes after I have been wafting the pheromone soaked plugs in the air (contained in an an old midge net) there is still no sign of moths appearing and I wonder if I have got the timing or place wrong. It is about 3 weeks ahead of my usual emperor/green hairstreak trip but I saw someone online photograph an emperor recently and assume there will be some out even though it is early. At 6 minutes I am really beginning to think I have blown it and have started to wander about as the wind is not strong and maybe not conveying the pheromone. Suddenly there is one moth - I turn around to see it and there are four flip-flopping around me in a frantic flutter.

I drop the lure and collect the tupperware type lidded tumblers. It is fairly easy to collect a fluttering moth in each and put them one by one into the cool bag. In the cool bag there are 3 cooling pads that have been in the freezer overnight - the sort you use on a sports injury, filled with a blue gel that remains icy. I zip the cool bag closed and wait a few minutes. In the cooler, darker environment the moths stop fluttering and settle down. Peeping in I can see through the semi-opaque tumblers when the moths stop flapping. I then get them out unscrew the lid and tip them gently onto the pieces of wood I collected earlier. I try not to touch them because if they get hold of a warm hand they cling on and do not want to let go. They warm up quickly and then fly off! On a piece of bark or warm stone they take a little longer to come back to life, taking between five seconds and several minutes to revive and fly off. Most give about thirty seconds of photo time before scarpering.

I was taking photos with the macro lens. The moths will sit for a short while and are too busy warming up to care about a camera in their face. Each one behaved differently. Some were off in a handful of seconds, others were a bit sleepy and were happy to sit in the sunshine a while rattling their wings to warm up their motors before flying off. The slower ones gave me time to get close-ups of wings to the point where I could see individual scales. You'd only get this chance otherwise on dead specimens were it not for the lures, and I was thinking about the Victorians etc and their propensity for studying and collecting things by killing them and mounting them in cases. I feel guilty about the false promise of a lure and wasting up to ten minutes of these creatures lives, trapping and cooling them. I doubt the vegans would approve. They appear to fly off unharmed and I quit the process and the top of the hill after about 40minutes in order not to draw too many male moths from all over, to a suboptimal spot.

close up of forewing eyespot

this one flew off and landed nearby in the grass
where it rested, giving me a chance to photograph the underside

those amazing antennae
with rows of tiny hairs between parallel branches

beautiful woolly colours

a peacock dropped by to see what all the excitement was about

a furrow bee(?) also came over to see what was going on

the cooler bag

I tried not to let the moths land on me
as they warmed up too quickly, then flew off

After I had all the photos I wanted, I put the lure away and descended from the top of the hill near the pylons, to the swampy gap South of Torduff Hill. I hoped to find green hairstreaks but realised I may well be too early. The blaeberries did not seem to be fruiting or looking quite as they do when the hairstreaks are on them. I did not spend a lot of time looking but couldn't see any flickers of green and brown and decided to take a bit of a walk back to the bike via a couple of places they might be found. Along the way I noticed hoverflies enjoying the unusually wind-free environment.

They'd be hovering just above my head but as soon as I raised the camera towards them they'd zip off and I'd have to wait till they came close again and slowly move the camera towards them. Not easy to get them in the frame, focus and get the shot before they'd zoomed off again, but I quite enjoyed the challenge. I'm going to guess they were Eristalis Pertinax again, my current species of choice because they were moving too quickly to get any kind of close up shot that would help ID them. Some sort of drone fly.

And that was about that. There was a peacock enjoying the blossoms on the trees beside the car park. Also I heard a woodpecker in the trees nearby so dumped the coolbag at my bike and climbed up the hill beside the trees but of course it stopped or had moved on by the time I got there. (The furthest East diversion on the gps map below.)

And I heard the green hairstreaks were out near the firing range at Castlelaw. Most years I'll go along there and photograph them. I prefer Torduff as it doesn't have a firing range next door or a massively steep cycle to the car park. I missed the early spot of better weather and now the forecast is pretty rubbish for the next few days. Not sure if I'll bother. I quite enjoyed finding them in less well recorded spots in the Pentlands last year - which is good news in that they are spreading out and going for world domination like the Holly Blues. Meanwhile I'm sitting indoors (low grey cloud cover outside) catching up on blogs and photos waiting to be processed.