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Welcome to my world..............

Monday 9 April 2012

Been a busy two weeks.....

I have not posted for a while due to being tied up with preparing data for the new website for the status and distribution of moths in Yorkshire.  This was launched officially on Saturday evening, and has generated a fair bit of interest so far.

Visit http://www.yorkshiremoths.info and have a look.

Yorkshire was lucky in that it had 1.5 million moth records sitting in a MapMate database, and using additional software developed by MapMate and their expertise provided a platform on which to make all that information available via the web.  I am pleased with the result and hope that others do too.

A catch up of the last two weeks.

A visit to Pilmoor on the evening of 29th March was brought to an abrupt halt when the oil warning light came on  on the generator and it promptly stopped.  A shame really, as there were plenty of moths about, and caught 50 of 12 species in about an hour.
A return visit the following night, after topping up the oil, produced fewer moths, but 15 species, including a Lead-coloured Drab, from under the aspen trees and at the same site as last year.
Lead-coloured Drab
The only other note of interest was while walking across the bridge over the River Ure in the town, I looked over the parapet and saw a couple of Kingfishers eyeing up a two groups of writhing full grown 2' eels with 10-15 in each group seemingly fixed in one location.  It gave the impression of a mass of male grass snakes fighting over a female, which cannot be true as eels migrate to the Sargasso Sea to breed.  Interesting behaviour nevertheless.