Whether it be birds, insects, plants or similar, it gives me great pleasure to find something that has not yet been locally recorded.

I have a hierarchy to these localities: a first for the garden, a first for the 10-kilometre square, a first for Wharfedale, a first for the vice county and a first for Yorkshire. A first beyond Yorkshire is just a dream world.

There is an element of luck to recording something new. Although, you can improve the odds. Scouring the Yorkshire Moths website I spot a gap. The cotton grass sedge-miner moth has been recorded to our south and north so in theory should be present in the middle.

With warm, still conditions I take my hand net to sweep the cotton grass as I walk our moors. After a week or so, on a glorious afternoon, my luck is in. As I descend Ilkley Moor, I add the moth I’ve been searching for to the Wharfedale list.

There are other occasions when you really do just get lucky. It is parents’ evening. The traffic in Otley has been bad over the bridge lately, so we park the car and choose to walk instead.

Unseasonably high winds peak and thrash heavily laden trees in full leaf during this time spent at school. Leaf debris lines the sides of the path as we walk back to the car.

I stop with my youngest daughter to throw sycamore keys that have fallen early; we watch as they rotate downwards like the blades of a helicopter. It is then that I notice that one key has a ‘s’ shaped dark blotch on its seed.

This is where the larva of a moth is mining away at the seed for food. I am not a great botanist. Now is this a sycamore or maple key? The plant species makes a difference to the moth species.

I try to remember what fellow Nature Notes writer, Ian, taught me about the angle of the keys, and take leaves and keys home to check the identification. My luck is in, it is Norway maple which makes the moth the Norway maple dot. Another first record for Wharfedale.

Norway maple, field maple and sycamore all have a moths unique to them that will mine their seed. I got lucky with the Norway maple dot.

The sycamore seed dot is an occasional visitor to the garden moth trap. That leaves the maple seed dot, which mines the seed keys of field maple, still to be found in Wharfedale. Perhaps it is time to make some luck!