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| Species of the Month - February 2014 Pale Brindled Beauty Phigalia pilosaria
No
need to wander far from home in the February cold and wet hunting for
this month's species: it will come to you. Just keep an eye on any
lit windows or around any outside lights after dark. Not many moths of
this size are about so early in the year, so if you see a large moth at
the window the chances are good that it will turn out to be a Pale Brindled Beauty.
If it is,
it will be a male, since the females don't have wings. They crawl
up tree trunks and the males fly around looking for them, using their
highly sensitive branched antennae to pick up the female's pheromones.
This one is hiding its antennae and is also rather dark but you can still tell it's a Pale Brindled Beauty from the markings. The only real confusion species is the Brindled Beauty, which normally flies a bit later and has much heavier markings, with distinct dark lines going right across the wing. The Hants Moths site shows the obvious difference between the two species.
UK Moths says the Pale Brindled Beauty "is fairly common in England and Wales, and scarcer elsewhere in Britain" but I've had it to the window 5 times in recent years at Taynuilt. The dates were: 24 Jan, 6 Feb, 11 Feb, 13 Feb, 28 Feb. That UK Moths page also shows the wingless females, but they are very hard to spot on their tree trunks.
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Carl Farmer
18 Feb: I had 2 to lit window,
Taynuilt
18 Feb: Clive Craik had 49 in his moth trap at
Barcaldine.
Jan 2014 - Velvet Shank
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