After the last post’s brief foray into the world of vertebrates, I’m back to my comfort zone of the spineless wonders of our home patch. Moth season is pretty much over, with very little appearing in the traps I’ve run the last few weeks. Instead our bathroom proved just too alluring for two of these little beauties. I don’t know whether it was the bathroom light or the 1970s tiles that we still haven’t got round to replacing that attracted them, but either way I was really chuffed when the other half managed to get this great shot of one.

It’s a Twenty-plume Moth (Alucita hexadactyla) which feeds on honeysuckle, so no idea what it was hoping to find in our bathroom. Instead of having 4 regular mothy wings, this little thing has 6 delicately  feathered plumes for each of the 4 wings. It doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that its name should really be the Twenty-four-plume Moth, but at least the Latin name is a bit more accurate. They are actually classed as Micro moths and this one was less than 2cm across, which I know is hard to tell from the photo as we don’t tend to have rulers on our bathroom walls for scale – perhaps something to consider when we do eventually replace those tiles!