In the morning it's not so much a question of waking them up as admiring them in their new bed before tapping them out into the undergrowth, where they rest until nightfall. The pleasures are multiple and sharpened by my neophyte status, but one is the sheer challenge of identification. For instance the noctuid family numbers 400 species and all are roughly a similar size but distinguished by subtle differences in an enormously complex sequence of patterns.
My all-time highlight was undoubtedly the moment I saw an eyed hawk-moth fluttering through the night grass towards the trap - a blur of greys and brown and unbelievable pink. Until the moment I spotted its plate in the book I didn't even know that this glorious species existed. Yet the thing I love most about the moth trap is that, in essence, it's an entire landscape distilled to these small exquisitely patterned envelopes of protein, which were earlier cut, larval mouthful by mouthful, from the leaves of sallow, poplar, hazel, birch and various grasses. Then through the alchemy of the pupal stage, the fully adult moths emerge. Paradoxically they invoke a landscape that is all around us but most of us have never seen. In the moth trap in the morning we are privileged to encounter this mysterious night place in an array of forms as strange and beautiful as anything conjured by hallucinogens. I am already completely hooked. It's merely a question of where I'll set the trap tonight.