Lake Forest Park 24th April 2010

Here it is - the first moth of my Pacific Northwest adventure - a beautiful little early spring flying pug settled by an outside light. Actually not quite true - a small pale tortricid fluttered out from a hedge on my first walk down to the shop yesterday and there has also been a large and elegant geometrid with slightly falcate wings sitting on the wooden cladding for at least a couple of nights - but this is the first I've been able to photograph and identify (no good moth book yet but hoping to borrow one soon).

It goes by the name of Eupithecia ravocostaliata. It is common in the West and the food plant is Rhamnus purshiana - that's Cascara, the characteristic buckthorn of Pacific coast lowland forests.

More about the site - I might describe this in better detail in another post or blog. The house where I am staying is in a cul-de-sac which, at the end, meets a small creek. The creek is lined with red alder, big-leaf and vine maples and the flanking slopes extend into a few acres of second-growth coniferous forest closed in by the surrounding houses and gardens. The house has several outside lights to play with and I think there might be plenty of interesting things to see mothwise over the next two months.

The town grew up as a suburb of Seattle about 100 years ago and one of the declared tenets of its planners - according to Wikipedia - was to preserve the wooded beauty of the land (Lake Forest Park - a park, by the lake, in the forest - we are probably less than a mile from the shore of Lake Washington - at this time Lake Forest Park seems to have been pretty much the frontier of the developed land around Seattle going north into the timberlands). True to this perhaps, many of the houses -including this one - are surrounded by spire like Western red cedars, Douglas firs and Western hemlocks. They often seem upwards of 30m and some are probably in excess of 40m.