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Moths seen in the garden to date A-C, D-F, G-M, N-Si, Sh-the end
February 2008 (whatever happened to January?)
The pantomime as usual was excellent and I will upload some photos once I have managed to downsize them. The subject was Sleeping Beauty.
Meanwhile here are some figures relating to the moths in our garden. At the end of the year we recorded 167 varieties of moths in the garden. Compared with other years this was poor and you can see from the chart below whilst the numbers were high in the early part of the year the usual months when one can expect high numbers were disappointing. Series 1 on the chart represents 2007, series 2 2006, series 3 2005, series 4 2004 so this gives an overall comparison of the years that I have been recording.
Peter also collects records on butterflies and this year we recorded 20 varieties of butterfly, again this is lower than previous years.
I have now uploaded the pictures from this year's pantomime please click the link below to take you to the page.
The
past few days have been exceptional. There are many signs of spring,
like these snowdrops in a neighbour's garden. The sky has been blue and
clear for most of the day and it has been mild in spite of an early morning
frost. Today was my day off so we went to Tropical
Wings and spent a most enjoyable few hours there. I always enjoy going
round butterfly houses and there were a few bonuses, like the fruit bats
that had young, the wallabies with their joeys, the humming birds and of
course the butterflies themselves. Here are a few of the pictures that
I took. If you click on the pictures of the humming bird, wallaby and fruit
bat you will see them in more detail, notice the joey peeping out and the
young fruit bat next to its parent.
Almost the end of February and I hadn't really expected anything new on the moth front for a week or two but this morning there was something that I had not seen before. It was a dotted border, agriopis marginaria, nothing unusual for this time of the year but today it was a female of the species. This differs from the male in that like a few of the winter moths it has only vestigial wings and is unable to fly, so to spot it by our outside light was quite a find.
