The Moths of the Hedgerow Line

The colour of a dead leaf in the rain, one rear corner rusted. It rests with the wings swept back like a paper glider; startled, it drops into the grass rather than flies. Larvae on poplar and willow.

Rose and olive, too deliberate to look wild. The larva carries false eyes and rears up like a small serpent; the moth flies early in the dusk, often before the sheet is properly lit. Willowherb.

Pale green washed with rust along the leading edge; it fades in the drawer to the colour of old newspaper within a season, which is why the plate notes it in pencil. Linden, hence the name; one brood, early.

The heaviest thing the line ever took: grey as weather, with a tongue longer than its own body, uncoiled at dusk from the bindweed flowers. Not resident — a guest from the south, in good years only.

The argument that taught the survey its caution. In the smoke years the black form, f. carbonaria, outnumbered the pale on every sheet; the books after the clean-air years tip quietly back. Hawthorn and blackthorn.

The line’s only late geometer, and half of it flightless: the female is brachypterous and walks her whole life at trunk height. The male alone comes to the lamp, ochre-mottled, late in the year when the sheet is rimed.

Small, cream, cross-hatched like the survey’s own graph paper. Two or three brood runs make it almost always on the wing; the earliest date in all the books belongs to it. Heath and bird’s-foot trefoil.

A small dark dagger with the cream hook of its name written at the base of the wing like shorthand. On warm August nights it comes in numbers that make the tally column useless. Nettle and dock.

Charcoal lettered with white dashes, like a widow’s correspondence. A southern species creeping north along the line in warm years; it loves the lamp, and sits all day on the porch of the station hut.

Buff forewing set with a row of black beads, and a crimson collar the bird learns to respect. Two broods; the woolly larvae overwinter in the hedge-base and are abroad in mild Januaries. Nettle and dock.

The show-piece of the box: hindwings of vermilion spotted black, hidden under sober brown until the moth is touched, and then flashed. Warning colours, honestly earned; the line took fewer each decade.

Jet and vermilion, the colour borrowed straight from its foodplant, ragwort, which it advertises rather than conceals. A day-flier; on the line it is logged at the lamp only as strays, resting on the sheet.