Hello world! I am back in action after a very leisurely start to the year, caused partly by days and days - and nights - of wet weather and partly by issues with my exceptionally faithful and long-lasting moth trap mercury vapour light bulb.
This is the all-important means of attracting moths, for reasons still debated by entomologists. In recent years, safety regulations have made the bulbs harder to get and I have been frankly too lazy to set about this task.
Luckily I don't need to, yet. Yesterday I cleared out our shed and found my box of MV bulbs, mostly expired and in some cases with a screw fitting instead of the pin one which my trap needs. On a whim, I decided to give the 'used' bulbs a final try. The first two were as dud as I had assumed. But the third works!
Hooray! And here is the first moth it has attracted in 2026, a lovely Oak Beauty. I would have given it top billing but I had a delightful Mother's Day encounter with an exquisitely fresh Small Tortoiseshell butterfly nectaring on Blackthorn, or Sloe, in a scruffy hedge bedecked with abandoned traffic cones where one of our local footpaths briefly skirts the A34. So that picture heads the post.
Here are just a few of the cones, below. We were taught at school that John Constable always included a small dash of red in his predominantly green, blue and brown landscapes. So, to look on the bright side, he might well have welcomed these.
There were three other species in the eggboxes overnight and here they are: five Hebrew Characters, again fresh like the Tortoiseshell with their pinkish thoraxes, a Common Quaker and that unfortunately-named moth, a Clouded Drab.
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