Happy New Year belatedly and I hope that you had a lovely Christmas, quiet or fun-filled according to your preference. We've had a happy time with the grandchildren and plenty of peace and quiet in between. Lots of good long Winter walks and bike rides too.
We even managed to stir ourselves in the current very cold weather and were rewarded today by sights such as this display of 'Puddle Icicles', a beautiful little micro landscape caused by cars splashing water on to the verge from a puddle, on an otherwise unremarkable stretch of road.
The fields immediately around our house meanwhile look like this, below, cold as cold can be, very still and quiet and misty too. Not the ideal circumstances for moths nor indeed moth trappers. However, driving back from Worcester two nights ago, when the dashboard said that the temperature outside the car was -3.5 degrees, we saw a moth flutter in the headlights.
Ever the optimist, I was persuaded by this to light the lamp when we got home, keeping my fingers crossed that the intense cold wouldn't do something nasty to the mercury vapour lightbulb. Here's the trap awaiting visitors. Did they arrive?
No, they did not. In the morning, the bulb was fine but the cowl had a thick rime of frost and the lawn all around was crunchy with thick ice.
The eggboxes were empty of all forms of life, not even the tiny flies which appear on almost every other day of the year. I will have another go in a couple of days' time when the weather may have crept back up to nine or ten degrees during the day and well above freezing at night. Meanwhile, I am having a look back at the year and hoping to compare my rather unscientific results with the much better-organised ones of Dave Wilton and the other ever-helpful contributors to my rod and staff, the Upper Thames Moths blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment