Previous contributors to this series have written about things that most people already know something about, but I won’t do that.

I like to deal with small obscure things that most people miss, especially those we are normally only aware of, not as the adult, but from the signs of what their larvae have been doing, such as leaf-miners and gall-causers.

There are two tiny micromoths living on the Creeping Willow that thrives at Ardeer, crawling across the old concrete and tarmac areas. Micromoths are not well enough known to have acquired common names, but English names have been invented for them, usually rather silly ones. These two are the Sandhill Midget, properly called Phyllonorycter quinqueguttella, and the Creeping Willow Roller, or Ancylis subarcuana. The names are longer than the moths.

You would never notice the moths, but the feeding signs of their caterpillars can be found, by getting down on hands and knees and searching the leaves of the willows.

The Midget is a leaf-miner. The caterpillar lives inside the leaf and eats the tissue between the upper and lower surfaces, leaving a brown papery patch betraying its presence. The adult moth is indeed a midget, only four millimetres long, and is brightly coloured, metallic gold with silver streaks and wedges.

The Roller’s caterpillar rolls a leaf into a tube then eats most of it from the inside. When it has finished with one leaf it moves to the next one along the stem and repeats the process.

By the time it is fully fed it has created a series of dead tubes like the rungs of a ladder. The adult moth is about eight millimetres long, and is dull greyish brown, what we in the trade refer to as an LBJ (little brown jobby).

As Creeping Willow itself is quite scarce, it follows that anything feeding on it will also be scarce. The Roller is classed Nationally Scarce A, and the Midget Nationally Scarce B. Neither of these little moths has been found anywhere else in Ayrshire, so this is a good example of just what an important place Ardeer is.