170 [January, 



night settles down, broken only by the sound of wings as a flock of 

 plovers passes over, or by the splash of the wild fowl feeding, and the 

 otters that haunt the adjoining reed bed, or the musical hum of a 

 distant threshing machine. Now is the time to return to the boat for 

 tea, and if you have any love for solitude and the sounds of the night, 

 pleasant, indeed, will be the time as you sit at the entrance of your 

 boat-tent peacefully watching for your moths. Presently there will be 

 the rush of a brownish Noctua dashing about the light, and after cir- 

 cling wildly for a minute or two, it will content itself with buzzing up 

 and down the glasses of the lower lamp ; this is Noctua ruhi, a perfect 

 pest in the fens at the close of the season. Soon come more rubi, till 

 there will rarely fail to be three or four of them about the lamps. 

 Keep a sharp look out and you w^ill see among them one rather 

 larger the rest, and with a preceptibly longer body. Now is your 

 time — not that there is any hurry about it, for our friend is by no means 

 inclined to leave the light — no net is required, take a pill box or cyanide 

 bottle, and your first iV. cannce will soon be secured. Even if standing 

 beneath your " pharos " and keenly on the outlook for visitors, you 

 may easily fail to detect canned as its comes up, so low is its flight and 

 so speedily does it make its way to the ground lamp. Moreover, our 

 Norfolk specimens are rather brown than red, some, indeed, of them 

 are getting on for black, and the colour helps to make them 

 inconspicuous. 



"When the distant clock strikes ten, you may, if cannce be your 

 only object, give up and turn in for the night, but a few other things 

 are now to be had ; JEnno7nos erosaria, tiliaria, &Jid fus cant aria, possibly 

 an early specimen of Nonagria lutosa, and certainly one or two N. 

 typJim, though the latter is so much less attracted by light than is 

 Cannes, as to give the impression that on this piece of fen the latter is 

 the commoner insect of the two, a very mistaken notion, as w^e shall see. 



The capture of cannce is, however, attended by some drawbacks, 

 and especially that, owing to its habit of flying through the herbage, 

 it is almost always more or less worn when caught. I have, therefore, 

 long been anxious to breed it, but have never succeeded until this year. 

 All the information I was previously able to obtain from other ento- 

 mologists was that cannce had formerly been bred in small numbers 

 f roul Yaxley, and was still obtained in the same way from a locality in 

 Sussex, but that the pupae were taken with those of N, typhce, and were 

 not recognised until the moths emerged. To this information I added 

 from Treitschke the fact, that cannce might be distinguished from typlice 

 by feeding and pupating with the head up instead of down. However, 



