O. Gothica and early moths

[Alan5319 at aol.com]

Hi Ian,

With reference to the O. gothica colour; I was referring to the red - brown 
form that stops short of ad gothicina. If you have Skinner, Plate 31, 9 and 
10 illustrate the difference.

We had a wild night in the trap last night - Thursday Night. There are over 
90 moths in there. This is a very high total for this time of the year. The 
notable oddity was a female  Pavonia pavonia (Emperor Moth). Not only is this 
early but it is certainly a first for our trap. There are many records for 
Co. Durham but none from this area, it always nice to see something new.

The other thing of note was the number of diptera in the trap. It would not 
be an exaggeration to say that there are hundreds of thousands. 

Scraping them together on the tray we ended up with a pile the was 10mm deep 
x 260mm long x 70 mm wide. This is a total volume of 182,000 cu. mm.

Each fly is very approximately.25 cu mm, this suggests some 546,000 of the 
wee beasts. This is a very rough calculation but it will have to suffice as 
we have no intention of counting them.

Alan & Jeri Coates