Sunday 6 July 2014

Salcey Forest

The Met Office is armed with the UK's biggest super computer. The BIG group, always full of wisdom, allocated 2 days to trap at this forest, targeting the Concolorous moth. So on Wednesday when the Met Office said possible light rain Friday but very mild and cold Saturday, we opted for Friday. By Friday the forecast was for heavy rain pretty much all night on Friday, so we cancelled the meeting. Following the rainfall radar on Friday night from home, it was apparent that the rain arrived much later - after the usual pack-up time. Indeed at home, the rain arrived some 9 hours after it was supposed to. Not all was lost, because the cold night of Saturday turned into a warm night, so Martin Albertini and myself decided to give it a go. We met a Northants mother already set up at the gate with lights on (I think the sun was still up and he was trapping in Bucks!), wondering where everyone was. The forecast warm night turned into a chilly one, of course. After identifying some of the Northants mother's catch for him, we finally left and I got home just before 4am.

No Concolorous were found, but Mr Wilton had pre-empted the group by trapping there a couple of days before and we have possible sightings to confirm.

We ran 4 traps and the total species count was not too bad overall. With some more to check we recorded 121 species so far. Peter Hall
Bordered Beauty 5/7/2014


Minor Shoulder-knot 5/7/2014

Swallow-tailed 5/7/2014

Vapourer 5/7/2014

Yellow-tail 5/7/2014
Sorry Mr Wilton, that the backgrounds aren't all white!

1 comment:

  1. Yes, very nice arty pictures. Couldn't you have chosen a Minor Shoulder-knot that hadn't been trodden on, though? As to my own images, I did try a leaf a couple of posts ago but that looked just as false as the white background! Maybe I need to borrow Dave Maunder's log...

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