Hantsmoths

An endangered Red Data Book species, confined to heathland, where it requires successional stages created by periodic small-scale clearances and grazing. Protected under the UK Wildlife and Countryside Act and therefore illegal to collect or disturb it in any of its stages, and a priority species under the UK Biodiversity Action Plan. In Britain this species has always been extremely local and was confined to Hampshire and the Isle of Wight by the early 1990s; while historically this moth has been recorded from several sites in Hampshire and on the Isle of Wight, in Hampshire it had been lost from the New Forest by the 1930s, and from the county as a whole in the 1960s (despite there having been at least one abortive attempt to re-establish the species on the mainland). On the Isle of Wight three sites had been lost by 1980, another was lost in the 1980s, and now a single native population remains. Wingspan male 27-30 mm, female 21-23 mm. Larva feeds on Saw-wort, over-wintering as a pupa.