Yellow Underwings

Large Yellow Underwings, Noctua pronuba.  Moth trap in Hayes on 4 September 2011.

These are the commonest moths in my garden catches so far. To create these images, I have edited the photos to orient them the same way, which is the way they are shown in my moth book. I have identified them and put the same species together.

Perhaps it looks obvious now that these belong together. When I first took them out of my trap, it was far from obvious; at least to me, a newcomer to moth identification. There is sufficient variation even in new moths to make many of them differ from the book, and then they change colour with age, become tattered, and lose some of their identifying features. The lighter one second from the right is probably a female.  But these all retain one feature; the beak-like appearance of their heads.

Lesser Yellow Underwings, Noctua comes.  Moth trap in Hayes on 4 September 2011.

Along with those five, I had these two; they are smaller, though that might not be obvious from this unscaled photo, shorter in relation to their width, and have different markings.  They are a different species, though I still hesitate with the one on the left, which looks rather beaky. But no, look at the dark wave near the end of the wing.  I'm still not confident about these identifications.  I need more photos of these.

The yellow hind wings for which these moths are named cannot be seen when they are at rest. They could be pinned down and spread out, but I will not do that. And I could make them fly away and watch what happens; but these moths are very lethargic in the morning and tend to stay in the foliage where I put them. Also, early rain was forecast on the day I trapped these, and so I photographed them just before dawn, and I would not have been able to see colour just by the dim illumination of the moth-attracting actinic strip light. Yes, these are excuses and I should try harder.

Lesser Broad-Bordered Yellow Underwings, Noctua interjecta. Moth trap in Hayes on 4 September 2011.

These are slightly smaller again,  and their name is longer.  The middle one is noticeably tattered and old.  There is also yet another similar species, the Broad-Bordered Yellow Underwing, but I didn't find any this time.  Anyway, the point of this post was to show the difficulty I am having in separating and identifying this group of Noctuids. I hope to improve with the help of photos like these.  The same sort of difficulty applies to Rustics and their relations, which I will show another time; one of those is even called the Uncertain!