I caught a puzzling Noctuid om 06/10/2026. With some help and research, I believe it is probably a Mniotype occidentalis. No English name as this would be the first UK record I know of. Obviously the ID is still tentative, but looking at "Noctuidae Europaeae Essential" it looks a very good match. Excuse the photo. The moth is in a pot as I am being careful not to loose it.
Obviously the moth has caused some interest and I have received helpful posts from several people. Steve Nash said, "Mniotype solieri (Bedrule Brocade) is perhaps more likely, given its recent spread north into Belgium. I don't think it can reliably separated on external features from M. occidentalis."
This is a good point, although I had looked at several photographs and thought the terminal border more like occidentalis than solieri. More photos showed that, in fact they can be very similar.
I did some more reading and research and was a bit surprised that the two species were only split in 2010,. and that the Bedrule Brocade was caught in 1976 long before the two species were recognised. Againing reading about them it transpires that gen-det (even if it was done) is not straight forward and not always definitive, and that the only certain way of ID is DNA analysis. That means that without DNA analysis the Bedrule Brocade is in the either or category.
Hopefully, with the help of Sean Clancy, we will be able to arrange DNA Bar coding for a definite ID.
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