:: Wild Places Blog ::

I’ve changed my name to Miss Whiplash this week and with very good reason. Are you thinking figure-hugging black leather trousers and top , thigh high stiletto boots, whip in hand at the ready?
No, the reason for the name change is more due to the injuries i think i must have sustained due to Ian’s [...]

We’re glad we took the precaution of booking the ferry ahead as when we arrived at Uig, Skye to collect the tickets people enquiring about going across to the islands were being told there were no tickets available until Monday of the next week. It was drizzling so we headed for shelter in the nearest [...]

A couple of weeks hard work getting a new kitchen sorted for Ian’s mum - although most of the hard work was on Ian’s part. As mum is 88 we didn’t think it would be a good idea for her to cope with all the dirt, noise and dust at her house while the kitchen [...]

Well it’s been somewhat of a stressful ten days or so since the last update - ending in good news though as we’ve now exchanged contracts on Ian’s house sale and had the offer accepted on a lovely place in South Uist (a bungalow for when we are old and decrepid haha). Packing up the [...]

After some fairly poor catches at the end of May when the winds were northerly and pretty cool things have finally warmed up and catches in the trap have been good for the last week. With having a small garden we don’t trap every night as we don’t want to interfere too much with the [...]

We didn’t hold out much hope for a bumper moth night as we had already had the trap out twice this week - on the 9th and 11th May and had caught precisely nothing. Although it had been warm during the daytime the temperature was due to fall as low as 3′C during the night. [...]

One of the things we were excited about was being able to moth trap in a totally different area than the rather built up Hertfordshire town that we currently call home. Our holiday cottage was an old cottage with walls three feet thick and consequently had a deep porch. As the weather was fairly breezy [...]

Well, our first proper night mothing on the 5th April brought us a nice catch. The night had a low of 4′C and the wind dropped to virtually nothing:-
1 Diurnea fagella, 2 Amblyptilia acanthadactyla, 1 March Moth, 16 small Quaker, 16 Common Quaker, 4 Clouded Drab, 12 Hebrew Character, 1 Chestnut. Plus 1 Nut-tree Tussock was found [...]

Well, my birthday present arrived this week - a Robinson type moth trap - purchased from Bioquip and very pleased with it i am too!
Why moths? It’s been something i’ve been considering for some time now. I was shocked to read recently that many British moth species have declined rapidly - one report i read [...]