A grand night out or "It would be rude not to..."

The Three Men were not in a boat but in a dark wooded area somewhere in the hills behind Sai Kung. We started chez moi, where Mrs. Ha provided pumpkin soup and beef stroganoff sloshed down with green tea. The cool box was filled with fruit, water, some fizzy poison-ishy stuff and dare I say, beer. When I returned home at 1am everything was untouched. Except the beer.

We drove up to a clearing where we set up the lights and we waited. The weather was on the cool side of pleasantly warm. Or if you prefer, the warm side of pleasantly cool. It was dry over one trap and mizzly over the other. They were barely 50m apart. There was very little wind. In fact this was ideal moth weather. Around us the Brainfever bird called incessantly. Collared scops owls hooted and R swore he heard a Slaty-breasted rail. We were so remote that in the 5-6 hours we were on site not a car passed and not a soul walked past us. The only people likely to have done so were the boys in blue to be honest.

We had our regulation dull coloured clothing on except for M who had escaped from Stalag Luft Mandarin O and deserted his wife for the evening. Good man! The pale blue sweater was a great disguise.



And it attracted moths too.

Now I have to point out that R & M are rather expert with the leps, whilst I am a bumbling amateur. But be that as it may, we all set about the traps with equal gusto and the cameras were produced to keep digital records of the evening's catch. Occasionally, just occasionally, a particularly fine specimen would solicit a different reaction. The option existed not just to photograph the beasts but also to give them a more tangible chance of fame. Out would come a small plastic tube or pot and well, "it would be rude not to....."

Here are just a few of the close to 200 species seen yesterday evening.







I think it is fair to say that squeamishness and moths don't go hand in hand. They do tend to get in your hair, on your limbs, down your shirt, up your trouser leg and as poor old Colin Plant in VC 20 once discovered, they can dance a fine tarantella on your ear drum. How many men can boast of having been hospitalized by a Flame Shoulder? The trick is to make sure that all of the moths have been removed before you crawl into bed with your spouse in the early hours of the morning. I can testify from past experience that beetles are no more welcome in our marital bed than moths and I have NO idea how it got there!!

We ambled from trap to trap for about 5 hours, barely noticing the dampness of the air increasing. Some may have called it drizzle but we were too absorbed in doing a final check for exciting species. And the glorious thing about moths is that the small ones can be every bit as challenging and indeed beautiful as the big brutes. We had only one break and that was for R & M to savour the beer that reaches the moths other beers cannot reach. Somewhere R has a photo of a moth trying to sip a little for itself. I haven't seen the photo yet but I think the intruder was Plutodes flavescens.

Finally we did decide to pack down. The evening was over, camaraderie had reigned supreme, fine moths had been sampled, though net in the gourmetic sense, and all went home happy.......... with the exception of those lucky specimens, whose proud families may return one day to see their fallen relatives preserved for posterity.

If you think moth-ing is potentially for you (and you should, by jove) keep an eye out for National Moth Night. I am serious. There will be public sessions open even to the lowest of the riff-raff (that includes me) and you might even have time for a beer.

Cheers!