Drawn - like moths to a flame

The Safari had already emptied the moth trap before we got stuck into a bacon butty with lashings of mushrooms, brown sauce and fluufy thick piping hot tatty-scones. Breakfast was chomped upstairs watching just one Peregrine do very little at all.

Earlier we had spent nearly an hour removing 20 Large Yellow Underwings and 6 horribly worn Dotted Clays from the various nooks and crannies of the trap. An intersting pale and speckly pug escaped before it could be captured in pot or lens. Easier was this Bird Cherry Ermine (? confirmation anyone) which was posing nicely on the edge of the trap. You can even see its yellow tiongue rolled up under its head

Along with the numerous Large Yellow Underwings we had just one Lesser Yellow Underwing and a few (Lesser?) Common Rustics.

As you can see the two are horribly similar ansd i n fact can only realy be identified by examination of their nether regions. Well you would be able to see if we hadn't cropped the pic to high and chopped of the script for Lesser Common Rustic - whata mistaka to maka...duhhh

'Common' wasa common theme for the moths this morning with a Common Carpet - the carpet refers to the patterns not that they eat carpets like the urban myths tell you.

Common Wainscot was, we think, a new moth for Base Camp, not checked all the records but it certainly hasn't been found in the last two or three years and there is not annotation in the field guide to suggest we'd had it earlier - a nice rich straw coloured specimen too.

Also common but not in name are these Crambids - but are they all the same species, two species or three species? We have to admit we are pretty useless at IDing them.

Crambid 1

Crambid 2

and Crambid 3

Other micros included these two little beauties
Micro 1

and micro 2

Another beauty this time easy to identify is the much larger Willow Beauty.

As for the footy - the gane could have ended 7-6 for either team. As it was 'Pool put away a cracking goal just before half time then added a second - again by new boy Kevin Phillips shortly in to the second half. After that Peterborough faded a bit and began to look a bit dejected, three were on the cards as 'Pool picked up the pace and put together some nice passing moves. Then with 15 minutes r so to play the defence did a silly faffing around rather than clearance
thing and gifted the ball to a 'Boro stiker in acres of space - the result was inevitable - Gilks was beaten unable to make a fourth or fifth fine save as he had done in the first half. 2 -1
The remainder of the game wasa tense affair with 'Boro desparately trying to find an equaliser - if the four minutes of added time had been longer they'd have probably got it.

Three points is three points though so bring on Derby County midweek and lets make it nine out of nine.

Where to next? A couple of days off but plenty of chores to do round Base Camp so we might not get far.

In the meantime let us know if the defenders in your outback are drawn into making horrendous mistakes like moths to a flame