National Moth Night has inspired me to dust off my moth trap and indulge in a summer pageant of colourful insects. With some disappointment I clock the dropping temperatures and cleared sky with twinkling stars. Not a positive development. Clear, cold nights deter moths from taking to the wing. I consider hanging the trap back up, but decide a small haul of moths would be suitably charming.
Opening up in the morning I find a reasonable 19 moth species in the egg boxes lining the trap, among them the common but stunning elephant hawk moths, in all their gaudy pinkness, and the regal white and buff ermines. The flat and finely etched fern moths are a new find for the garden, thus ticking all the moth satisfaction boxes.
One stubby little white moth is not immediately familiar and I “pot” it in a glass tube. Close examination reveals it to be my first concolorous.
East Northamptonshire is a renowned heartland for special butterflies, most crucially the black hairstreak and the recently reintroduced chequered skipper, but it is also headquarters for the less exalted concolorous moth.
First discovered in Britain in 1844 at Yaxley, 12 miles east of Benefield, it was considered to be a wholly new species and named Nonagria concolor by the French entomologist Achille Guenée, although even then he noted the similarity between it and the German Nonagria extrema. Confusion continued about the identity of several fluffy fawn moths, with preeminent lepidopterist James Tutt calling concolor “puzzling”. Eventually it was concluded that this was the same animal as N extrema and, as extrema was described first, the scientific name concolor survives only in the common name.
The concolorous feeds on the small reeds (wood and purple), laying a perfect string of pearl-like eggs along the crease of a curved blade of the big grass. In the 180 years since its discovery here, almost all resident breeding populations have been in wet woodland and marshes in between Huntingdon, Stamford and Northampton. Although it is rare and declining across its scattered European distribution, we have yet to discover how to halt its dwindling.
