Arran moths and other beasts.

A recent holiday to the north of Arran with a light trap resulted in a lot of interesting moths, many new for me, a few that may be of national or regional interest, and others that were fabulous looking creatures. Other things were recorded too. If you find any incorrect or slightly dodgy (over optimistic) identifications please use the comments section to help put me right, TIA.

We have been to Arran a few times in the past and later on I will add notable and interesting species from those visits too.

 I found myself being somewhat overwhelmed by the number of species and the complexity of sorting some of them out. Also being very out of practise with butterflies, for example, species I used to know, meant that I didn't delve as deeply into the less obvious and most probably the more interesting or significant.

First up, and I think I have this one correctly, Blue-bordered Carpet. Caught in the poly tunnel in the garden.

Blue-bordered Carpet.

This started off as Beautiful Carpet, then Pretty Pinion, took an unlikely diversion to Fir Carpet and then I've settled on BBC. And I thought this one would be easy.

There were a lot of pugs and a lot of Eudonia/Scoparia things. I usually like the Crambids, in Orkney they are relatively straightforward, that was not the case in Arran and I almost gave up on them.

Here are a couple of culprits.

Eudonia lacustrata.

Eudonia mercurella.

Fairly confident with these IDs but very happy to be corrected. I'll dig out some more of these later.

Pugs, hard. Well some of them.

Foxglove Pug.

Ling Pug I reckon.

Not sure, possibly White-spotted Pug by the spots on the abdomen and a vague one on the thorax, unsure. Maybe this is Current Pug though.

Narrow-winged Pug.

Green Pug.

V Pug.

There are some more pix of the difficult ones which I'll add when I've processed them a little.

More to add, a lot more! These were mostly found via a Heath trap running a green synergetic light. However, I found the garden poly tunnel a rich hunting ground and a few nice moths that didn't turn up in the light trap were found in there.