For months, both earlier this year and in recent weeks, I’ve been casting an eye over all the patches of Ground-ivy (Glechoma hederacea) I’ve noticed so I was delighted, last Friday, to finally find what I’ve been searching for, a new leafminer. Even better, as well as the tell-tale blotches on several leaves, when I turned over one leaf there was also an empty larval case.

These are the feeding signs for the larvae of the little moth Coleophora albitarsella (also known as the White-legged case-bearer, you can see the rather non-descript adult moth on the UK Moths website here), which munches on a wide variety of different plants (see full list on the British Leafminers website here). This moth species is relatively scarce in Glamorgan, with just a few sightings this millennium; in fact, it’s not very common anywhere in the UK, with just 109 records currently showing in the NBN Atlas (110, when mine is added) , so I feel rather privileged to have found these leafmines.