A Grass Webworm Herpetogramma licarsisalis - the first Portland record - first trapped but not secured at the Obs overnight Sunday/Monday was re-caught soon after dusk last night.
The Grass Webworm saga was a memorably stressful little event that could easily have ended in tears. When we got around to doing the Obs moth-traps yesterday morning we'd just been inspired by a Twitter message reporting that a Grass Webworm had been trapped overnight on Scilly. We had what turned out to be an entirely erroneous mental image of the species as being something as big as a Mother of Pearl so when we saw this spread-winged shape amongst all the slightly smaller Rusty-dot Pearls on the underside of the Perspex lid of one of the traps we weren't sure what it was but didn't immediately think of Grass Webworm:
What followed was a comedy of errors when the moth twice dropped into the bowels of the trap only to suddenly whizz straight out when we risked removing the cone; after briefly settling in full view it then shot off again and disappeared deep into an ivy clump next to the trap. We still weren't certain what it was that we'd seen and were further confused on checking the UK Moths website to find a photo of an individual with a resting posture more like that of a Rusty-dot Pearl. As the day went on it became clear from images of, for example, another one trapped overnight in Dorset that we really had seen a Grass Webworm but that, without a specimen, it certainly wasn't claimable. Fortunately, all's well that ends well and soon after dusk last night what was most likely the same individual was re-caught in the same trap:
Our specimen was alarmingly skittish but we did eventually get a photo of it close to a Rusty-dot Pearl to give an idea of their relative sizes © Martin Cade:
