Editor's note: Christina Brodie has shared a wide variety of drawings and paintings from Nature in Micscape. In this latest series she has studied insect life attracted to a natural trap, a skylight as shown below. She shares a variety of drawings and paintings of these subjects, part 2 of this gallery is below. All images are copyright Christina Brodie and should not be used without her permission.
July 2024
Welcome back to my series of moth paintings continued from last year!
The drawings and paintings you see here are made from life, with an initial sketch being made from a live or dead specimen prior to following up with photographic referencing.
I loved the paintings of Keith Brockie as a child, and his “Wildlife Sketchbook” was instrumental in influencing my future career as a painter of natural history and the outdoors.
The following images are representative of a more detailed, “field guide”-style approach to recording individual moth species, showing several views and some detail. The examples below hail mainly from the Noctuidae (owlet moths) and Geometridae (named for their caterpillars - inchworms - whose movement appears to “measure” the ground, as they inch along in humping movements).
I also came across several Underwings, which are spread out across a number of families (Geometridae, Noctuidae, Erebinae).
The location at which the moths were found was a site surrounded by cultivated trees (oak, birch, willow and poplar) with hawthorn and beech hedges, some woodland/ scrub, and grassland. As such, the moths were a good representation of their environment and ecosystem in terms of their fodder plants/ lifecycle / geographical coordinates. I have included their food plants for comparison.
#1. Scalloped Oak (Crocallis elinguaria).
Plants: Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna), blackthorn (Prunus spinosa).
#2. Snout (Hypena proboscidalis), which has an uncanny resemblance to a Stealth aircraft, pictured alongside!
Plant: Common nettle (Urticaria dioica).
#3. Orange Underwing (Archiensis parthenies)? This was partly reconstructed from a decaying specimen, and may even have been Lesser Broad-Bordered Yellow Underwing (Noctua janthe).
Plant: Birch (Betula pendula).
#4. White-point (Mythimna alba).
Plant: Cocksfoot grass (Dactylis glomerata).
#5. Turnip (Agrotis segetum). A rather homespun name for this delicate moth, with black patterning on a buff background, whose patterning reminds me of Charles Rennie Mackintosh with its proportions. The caterpillars, however, are the not so popular infesters of root crops known as cutworms.
Plants: (larvae only) Root vegetables (Daucus carota, Beta vulgaris, Brassica rapa), other herbaceous.
#6. Vine’s Rustic (Hoplodrina ambigua).
Plants: Dock (Rumex sp.), dandelion (Taraxcum officinale), other herbaceous.
#7. Vapourer Moth Caterpillar (Orgyria antiqua). Named for its pheromones and better than a fashion show, this creature has four shaving-brushes positioned along its back, and tufts of long bristles with miniature pompoms attached, at the head and tail ends. It is fairly common, but does not pose a pest threat.
The adult vapourer moth (which I did not manage to see) has pronounced sexual dimorphism - the flightless female looks like a large grey hairy flea - while the male is chocolate-brown, with two white wing-spots and the appearance of a more conventional moth. See here for more information https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/invertebrates/moths/vapourer .
Plants: Oak (Quercus robur), hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna), blackthorn (Prunus spinosa).
#8. Red Underwing (Catocala nupta). A splendid example of this species decided to rest on a wall indoors, at just the right height for me to be able to sketch it in some detail, before finishing it with washes of a clear fire-engine red and black, to detail its startling hind wings.
Plants: Black and white poplars (Populus nigra / alba), willows (Salix sp.)
#9. Thought to be Lesser Yellow Underwing (Noctua comes).
Plants: Nettle (Urticaria dioica), broad-leaved dock (Rumex obtusifolius), foxglove (Digitalis sp.)
#10. Underwing species, possibly Large Yellow Underwing? (Noctua pronuba)
Plants: Annual meadow-grass (Poa annua), foxglove (Digitalis sp.), other herbaceous.
***********************************
© Christina Brodie 2024
For source information, I used the following website run by Ian Kimber: https://ukmoths.org.uk
Comments to the author are welcomed, and can be contacted via the site webmasters.
