The Lyons Share

Last night, Mark put the trap out at Southerham and we opened it this morning to find a single gravid Thyme Pug (Nb), the first in Sussex since 1925! A cracking little pug. Two nights earlier we recorded some other really nice moths such as the first Chalk Carpet (Nb & BAP) for the site and some really nice pyralids including THREE Moitrelia obductella (pRDB3 but expanding and in Sussex only ever known from the Lewes Downs but new to all SWT reserves) and a cool little Nephopterix angustella. Three of those were new for me, I'm edging ever closer to 7000. Only three to go.

1925. The Last of the Time Pugs, while attempting to interfere with the birth of Margaret Thatcher, misses Lincolnshire and ends up in Sussex (she really did need the help of Space Pug to get that right but they were off-planet). She fought off an invasion by an intergalactic swarm of cybernetically-augmented parasitic wasps while she was there though.

Soon after the aliens had been thwarted, she received a distress signal from the distant future. The year 2018. A rogue band of Gigantic Humanoid Conservators have constructed a Mercurial Star Trap, capable of transfixing the minds of the innocent citizens of Earth and trapping them in silicone tubes where they are to be recorded and entered into a huge database, for all eternity!!! A scarce Chalk Carpet, hiding on the underside of the mega structure where the light cannot reach them, was able to get the distress signal out.

However she was too late, three Moitrelia obductella were already trapped in the sinister blue egg chambers within, zombified and awaiting incarceration. Look at their poor vacant eyes...

She jumped in the TARDIS (Thyme and Rosemary Drifting in Space). No sooner had the Time Pug appeared above the cruel device, she became transfixed by it too! And one particularly ugly giant captured her, placing her in the dark refrigeration unit! She had one chance to escape however. This particular beast was stupid and had a selfish urge to capture an image of the Time Pug for his own perverse reasons, outside of the holding device in a natural setting. Nearly 7000 innocent souls have been permanently captured in it's database. What a foul creature! Yet as soon as the vessel was opened, the Time Pug flew out, smiting the evil giant on the head with a mighty blow, before jumping in the TARDIS and heading off into the future.