Moths

Unlike Butterflies, Wiltshire’s moth population, with a few notable exceptions, is seldom noticed or remarked upon. Commonly thought of as drab brown night flying insects, nothing could be further from the truth. Many of our resident moths are very beautifully marked and a fair number fly by day.

Largely thanks to a small but dedicated band of enthusiastic ‘moth-ers’, however, we know that Wiltshire boasts around 1600 species which means that they outnumber their better known ‘cousins’, the butterflies, by a fact of almost 35 to 1 in the county!

Some of the commoner species that you may encounter are Wood Tiger, White Ermine, Hummingbird Hawk and Burnished Brass.

The splendid, and somewhat fearsomely marked caterpillar of the Elephant Hawk are often found feeding upon fuchsias in gardens and parks. 

To find out more about macromoths and micromoths in Wiltshire take a look at the County Recorders pages.