Schmidt's Quaker

Seems like we found a good moth species at Kamen Bryag, Bulgaria already. See HERE . I originally identified it as a Common Quaker but see I-naturalist link for discussion. Apparently it is a strictly protected species (see here and lepiforum here). Will be fascinating what the moth recording reveals over the coming years. I'm still only using a travel LED moth trap for a slow steady start. Once we get power on site (hopefully by March 2023) and start running more powerful lights it could get very interesting indeed. 

Had this very kind and informative response from László Ronkay an expert on this species.

'it is a great finding, indeed! It was curious by the former disjunct records how the species was spread after the last Ice Age but now the traits are better recognised. Your specimen is somewhat intermediate between the ssp. schmidtii in the Carpathian Basin and the ssp. pinkeri in western Anatolia but closer to our "typical" moths having darker brown ground colour and reduced crosslines.

The species is in a definite spreading in the Carpathian Basin since the Millennia, now it can be considered as widespread in the less disturbed oakwoods eastwards from the Danube both in the mountains and the lowland and appears in more and more localities in Transdanubia, including the surrounding of Budapest and I myself met it on our balcony (on the seventh floor) at the light of a hiperactinic 8W tube three times in the last four years... This process may appear also in the small population fragments in the Balkans, if so, we can hope to detect them due to their spreading to places where lepidopterists (or photographers) collect/photograph more frequently'

Schmidt's Quaker, Dioszeghyana schmidtii , Little Oak Group Bulgaria project plot , Kamen Bryag, April 2022. I-Naturalist project HERE.