Hello. I have just set myself up on the blog and this is my first post so please bear with me if it all goes horribly wrong.
I hope you are all enjoying the sunshine and have been visiting Rye Meads. The warm weather is bringing out lots of butterflies and as i was out and about yesterday with the work party i noticed lots of common blue, meadow brown and large white along with gate keeper, red admiral, comma and small copper. There were also plenty of brown hawkers along the ditches and a lovely female southern hawker sitting near the kingfisher bridge.
With a cloudy night forecast i decided to run the moth trap and hoped there would not be too much rain this morning. It was quite a successful trap with 51 species identified and about 6 more micors that i am struggling with so taking a break and writing this blog. Macro moth highlights from the trap include grey dagger, Chinese character, drinker, ruby tiger, garden pebble, pale prominent, marbled beauty, brimstone, webb’s wainscot, lots of silver y and mother of pearl and a good selection of underwings with broad-bordered, lesser broad-bordered and least and lesser yellow underwings and a straw underwing. I have tried to add a picture of the straw underwing not sure if it worked. Micro moths included diamond-back moth, pyrausta aurata, agriphila geniculea, agonopterix alstromeriana, aspilapteryx tringipennella and limnaecia phragmitella.
The kingfishers are currently incubating their third brood so not too much action at the moment but once the young hatch and feeding starts things should pick up. Incubation normally takes 19-21 days and with the second brood fledging on the 29th July we are looking around next weekend for hatching so the Bank Holiday weekend at the end of the month should be good.
I hope you have all got your camping gear ready for the Big Wild Sleep Out running nation wide this weekend. For more information please see www.rspb.org.uk/thingstodo/sleepout/
Thanks
Vicky