PR Wingpower

I'm giving the moths a rest this weekend, not just because it's gone colder but to avoid over-trapping. I don't know if this is a real danger - Ben & Co, advice welcome - but it seems common sense not to bring the same specimens to light over and over again. They mostly just doze away but it isn't a natural experience for them. Here instead is an advert from The Economist which caught my eye. A curious combination: butterflies and plastic car parts.

Top marks, though, to the designer who sorted the arrangement. It made me think nostalgically of tapes, which is where I used to see the initials BASF. I'll be most impressed if any reader knows what they stand for. Check out the company's interesting entry on Wikipedia to find out.

I said I was giving the moths a rest but that isn't entirely true. In order to show my mother-in-law and brother-in-law the felled trunks of our frost-destroyed Cordyline australis, one of thousands of such victims currently a sad sight in the north of the UK, I turned on our back door's outside light. Within minutes, a moth was fluttering suicidally close to both the light and an adjacent web spun by a cunning spider. Sorry the picture is so poor, but you should be able to make out both moth (to the right) and strands of web. I just checked this morning, and I am pretty sure it escaped.

I am recycling the Cordyline as (a) tree house thatch, using the leaves, as mentioned a few posts below (b) a raft modelled on Kon Tiki using the fibrous trunks and (c) also using the trunks, a floating platform for a duck and drake who have settled on our pond and may need somewhere fox-free to nest. You can read more about this on the Guardian's new Northerner blog btw, though now that the clocks have gone forward (have you remembered..?) you may not have the time.