Light-trap log · Hollin Bank, WestmorlandEntry 41
Moths at the Lamp
Night of 23–24 July 1896 Wind SW, light 61 °F at 11 p.m. Moon 2 days past full, overcast
You hold the lamp. Move the pointer, or tap the page, and the moths come to it. Keep still for three seconds and the light goes out; they settle on the page and eat the writing, letter by letter. Move again to startle them.
10.15 p.m. Lit the lamp and hung the sheet from the orchard wall. The air was close and still after the rain, which is the best of all conditions. The first visitor was a Large Yellow Underwing. It came in fast, struck the glass twice and sat on the sheet with its hindwings hidden, as they always do.
11.00 p.m. The sheet is busy. Three Angle Shades, wings creased like dead leaves. A Buff-tip, which I took for a broken birch twig until it moved. Two Peppered Moths of the pale form and one of the black, which my father never saw in this valley and which now comes to every lamp near the mill towns.
11.30 p.m. An Elephant Hawk-moth, pink and olive, circled the lamp at least forty times before it settled. I have never seen a moth fly straight to a light. They come in spiralling, as if trying to keep the lamp at a fixed angle to one side, the way they would keep the moon. With the moon so far off, that angle holds them on a straight course. With my lamp a yard away, it bends them into a spiral.
12.10 a.m. I turned the wick down to trim it. Within a minute the sheet was empty and the moths had gone down onto the table, onto this very book. When I brought the light back up there were holes in the page. I record it because no one will believe it. They had eaten the ink first, then the paper around it, one letter at a time.
12.40 a.m. Garden Tiger, the only one this season. Brimstone Moths all night, small and sulphur-coloured and quick to leave. I have closed the book on a sheet of blotting paper and weighted it with the lamp base.
| Large Yellow UnderwingNoctua pronuba | 14 |
| Brimstone MothOpisthograptis luteolata | 9 |
| Angle ShadesPhlogophora meticulosa | 3 |
| Peppered Moth, 2 pale, 1 blackBiston betularia f. typica, f. carbonaria | 3 |
| Buff-tipPhalera bucephala | 1 |
| Elephant Hawk-mothDeilephila elpenor | 1 |
| Garden TigerArctia caja | 1 |
| 7 species | 32 |
Lamp out at 1.55 a.m. E. M. Ashworth