Pheromone Lures

Thursday, April 14

I haven't totally run out of patience......very nearly though. My PC is playing up and I can't fix it. It sets off OK and then freezes. 

I wanted to copy the photos I needed onto a memory stick - and the PC would not open the stick.

 I tried to load some new photos onto my laptop, ready for editing and was told that there wasn't enough memory to do so.

I then spent some time removing big programmes from my laptop, then I could upload my photos. Hurrah. Hm. 

My editing programme then decided, for the first time ever,  to not allow me to make any changes and kept crashing, deleting the photo as it did so.

Believe me, this a precis of the time I have spent on this. 

Another beautiful, sunny day without rain. The sprinkler was on the potatoes and onions again, they're thirsty crops. The local farmer was setting up an irrigation system on a nearby potato crop as we returned from this week's INR test at the surgery in North Walsham. A two-week gap before the next one. There seemed to be more cars around to-day - and a long queue of trolley-pushers, the recommended two metres apart - outside Lidl. The queue stretched for the length of the car park.

There was a cold bite to the wind to-day, as I found out when sitting outside watching the pheromone lure trap.

Female moths exude sex pheromones in order to attract males for breeding. These males have one desire: find the female moth before others of their kind beat them to the punch. Many female moths are sedentary, its the males who are most often found in moth traps. 

Thought. I wonder how factually correct the latter part of that statement is. 

To-day, we were using the Emperor moth lure. It's a day-flying moth which we have seen in the garden once before. Not to-day. It was so easy last year in the Western Hebrides, they were everywhere and easily lured.

NOT MY PHOTO

The recommendation is that the lure, (an impregnated cork in this instance), is placed in a sunny position, at about chest height and left for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, it can be moved 50 metres for another 20 minutes. After two sessions, the wind drove me indoors.

 Helping to entertain us was a Blue Tit, nesting in the bamboo thicket and using our weeping Silver Birch as its song post. The noise gets tedious after a while - it's non-stop.

There was also a visit from a much less welcome visitor. A rat. Clearing up under the bird feeders. They appear to be more obvious in general. One theory being that there isn't any fast food around for them so they have to forage elsewhere. We don't have any food outlets in the village, it's normal dyke dwelling beasties looking for an easy meal when they have a litter. 

Keeping up the garden flowers folder........

Alpine Irises. Pam thinks that they're lovely, I'm ambivalent.

The white flowered shrub growing in the front border, is known as 'Pat's shrub'. It was a present and the name tag has gone. Previous gardener I suspect.