Sunday 6 August 2023

The Old Vic latest

It's cold and raining so pretty grim really for early August. Been a few new for year moths and the garden moth year list is now on 361. The rain was torrential yesterday with night lows of 10 C so I didn't take the risk with putting out the moth traps. Looks like it might improve a bit towards the end of this week but overall seems like we have, to some degree, blown the peak season for moths. This time last year we were on 418 for the year. 

I presume this bright orange dark edged Thorn is a male August Thorn although it is resting in what I understood was  the raised winged September Thorn posture
Small Scallop I think
Lots of variation as always with Common Rustic agg specimens- this contrasting one was very smart. This species is moth of the moment with up to 10 a night. Also Ruby Tiger had some double figure nights recently. Box-tree moths have reached their highest numbers here (up to 5) . On Friday there were 52 species of over 110 moths and we had a couple of nights last week of over 60 species from 160 individuals but last summer there were many nights of over 100 species of over 250 individuals just from the MV and also this year I've been trying to run two traps every night, so overall not great. 
The mini-farm in August- haven't needed to do any watering for weeks now
The lavender is out fully now attracting lots of bees in the cottage garden
The Old Vic on a gloomy summer day- only a few weeks remaining of living here and still don't know where we are going yet
Meanwhile in the mini-zoo we've added some Yellow Labs to the Paludarium to add a bit more colour and it was good to see the Malaysian Forest Scorpion having a walk about a couple of evenings ago. It was checking out the Ghost Mantis who constantly sits over her egg case (above). The new Asian Fawn Tarantula continues to permanently hide. Our mini-zoo species list has dropped to 92 so will be spending some time this school summer holiday re-stocking to the target 100 species of 'pets'.    

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