What a beautiful moth! This beauty landed on me and I had to call Dale to capture it without me disturbing it.
It's a blood-vein moth (Timandra comae), widespread in Wales, with beautiful, fringed antennae which you can see against my sleeve if you look closely.
Our town was permitted to put in a tarred carpark near the local store, provided we also established a wetland habitat as a buffer between the asphalt surface and the River Cain. It's become a beautiful spot full of butterflies and other pollinators that buzz.
Ever since Rachael drew a rare Welsh butterfly for me on Mother's day, I've been on a mission to see the silver-studded blue in real life. I haven't yet achieved this feat, but captured one of the other 'blues' along the way, the European common blue, Polyommatus icarus
We're so very excited that our outdoor camera finally captured a hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus, a protected species) in our yard! This is brilliant news - we'd been finding scat that we'd had confirmed as hedgehog, but ... seeing is believing
We'd put a covered feed station outside, with a narrow maze of bricks threading inside it to deter cats. The food has been disappearing for the past 4 nights, but this is the first camera capture!
We've also been placing shallow basins of water outside for it because of the current drought.
Woohoo!
The way it stretches and contracts its body makes me think of a leech's movements!
These nocturnal omnivores are often killed on roads as they forage and are also declining in numbers through habitat loss.