So, moths are generally boring and ugly, and tend to mostly look the same (small and brown-grey) but still the insect books devote large amounts of space to every species of moth you might possibly come across. (They also devote a quite disproportionate amount of space to butterflies; I see one butterfly a year, but they take up one tenth of the book. I used to think I saw a few more, but they turned out to be day-flying moths.)
Anyways, yesterday there was an annoying big moth in the house, so I got my special bug-catching plastic container and caught it to put it outside since otherwise they fly around in the bedroom when I am trying to sleep and I can hear them, and sometimes they crash into my head. But then I thought, since it was big and seemed to actually have some markings rather than just being brown, I would look it up in my insect book moth section. And, there it was, quite - fairly anyway - clearly a "slender owlet" moth.
Since it had stopped fluttering around inside the container, I thought it might be possible to take pictures of it as it might stay still. The bathroom is the smallest, least cluttered room so I took it in there, and if it started flying around it wouldn't be so hard to catch again as in the rest of the house.
It's kind of hard taking close-up pictures with a snapshot-type digital camera as it is hard to tell if it is actually focused properly, and often it looks like it has focused, but when you look at the pictures later you discover it was not. In this case, I could see from the image on the display screen that in many cases it was passing through the correct focus and then setting it wrong, i.e. I get it to focus and it starts off on blurry and goes through it's range of focusing distances, including a nice clear one before finally settling on "very blurry". So obviously the lens could focus, but the camera couldn't work out how for that distance + zoom combination, and there's no manual focus.
Anyway, here's two of the pictures. You can see it's very feathery antennae quite clearly, especially in the second photo. The first photo is a bit washed out because of the flash, but it did pretty much look like this if you had enough light on it - when it was flying around or sitting on the wall it looked much duller as the light wasn't enough to bring out the patterns - like the Stargate-like orange w-with-a-line-over-it in the middle of each wing. It also has a weirdly pointed nose, and kind of looks like an aeroplane.
The moth's actual size is about 1" long, maybe a little more, and in case you missed the name, it is probably a Slender Owlet moth, but I don't have the book here to give the scientific name.
The cord is made of fairly fine thread so takes a while to "braid" - it uses 5 loops of thread to braid it, so 10 strands. It's my first proper actual use of one of these braids (which were made in the medieval and tudor times for tying and lacing all sorts of things) other than using one to wrap a present for Mum's birthday.
