The evening party assembled as planned at the Ivinghoe Beacon car park. It was almost immediately agreed that the air temperature was far too low for any trapping in this area – in spite of the theoretical possibility of catching Wood Tiger and/or Light Feathered Rustic. However, having come all this way we felt that we ought to do something, so we drove to the Bridgewater Monument on the Ashridge Estate about a mile down the road and split into two camps within the (theoretically warmer) woodland. We set up 6 lights (a sheet on the side of the Landrover plus five traps) on the Hertfordshire side of a ditch whilst the chaps (and one chap-ess) from Buckinghamshire ran a further three lights on the other side of the ditch in their own county – a couple of hundred yards away.

The intended inter-county competition was largely forgotten as both teams considered it increasingly likely that the most probable result would be a “no score” draw, but eventually a moth did appear to set the ball rolling. The 9 lights ran from about 21.30 to midnight, but in the last hour, perhaps the last hour and a half, the moths stopped flying altogether as the temperature plummeted to a depressing 7 degrees Celsius (an interesting situation, given that we were a mere 29 days from mid-summer and only 26 days off the longest day of the year!). We eventually managed 10 macros and a micro – with a grand overall total of 22 individual moths in our 6 Hertfordshire lights. Two traps had absolutely zero moths. The Buckinghamshire crew scarcely did better; one of their traps also scored a duck, though they did get a Brimstone moth, which we did not. Words such as “dire” do not adequately convey the situation. Can it possibly get any worse? Is this the future of mothing as we know it?

The Hertfordshire list was as follows:

Macro Moths

1x Frosted Green 1x Water Carpet 2x Small Phoenix 2x Common Pug 1x Brindled Pug 1x Purple Thorn 5x White-pinion Spotted 1x Coxcomb Prominent 1x Common Quaker 2x Nut-tree Tussock

Micro Moths