For our village festival in Forest Row, East Sussex, we thought we'd run a moth trap alongside all the bands and other events going on on the village green. To be extra sure of getting things to look at we ran it the night before as well and then sorted them out on the night of the festival while running the trap again.

We put off looking at the smaller moths until late into the evening, not least because we had so many people coming to see what we were doing. It was only then that we had a sense that we had caught something interesting. We ended up with two individuals of Musotima nitidalis, one from each night the trap had been out. This was first recorded in Dorset in 2009, and is a species from Australia and New Zealand, probably imported here on a tree fern. There have been other records around Ashdown Forest too, but still relatively few records. There's a garden centre up the road, so maybe that was the source?