Hawk Moths of Silverdale

• 

After a year and a half of lock downs and restrictions it is nice to finally be able to visit new places. Silverdale is on the coastline of Lancashire and is perfect for seeing sea birds, butterflies and flowers but we are not looking at these today. Today we are looking at moths, Hawk moths. To do this we must wait for darkness to fall. This is when the moths of the night take to the air. To attract these majesties of the night we can use a moth trap which is a box with a light. The light attracts the moths and they fall in the box.

This is a Heath Trap which is a
Collapsible rectangular box with funnel. There are many other designs of moth trap but this is the cheapest, apart from making your own of course.
These are available at www.nhbs.com

After setting up our moth trap we wait to see what the night brings if you are lucky you will get some large hawk-moths like I did. With help from my excited partner we managed to catch three different Hawk-moths. We then put them in clear pots so we can see them better and pop them in the fridge, this does not hurt the moths but calms them down. We then wait till morning to photograph them and release them.

Moths found:

Elephant Hawk-moth
Deilephila elpenor

Small Elephant Hawk-moth
Deilephila porcellus

Poplar Hawk-moth
Laothoe populi

Thankyou for taking the time to read this post and hopefully you enjoyed it.
For more posts like this check out my other posts below

Would also like to thank my partner who's interest in moths has allowed me to have this insight into the moths world.
Click Here to see his PEAKD Page