Clevedon Wildlife

For about 15 years I have regularly searched Willows and Sallows on the patch for emergence holes or, better still adult Lunar Hornet Clearwings. 15 years and not a sniff.... If only someone had produced the pheromone ?? And then suddenly word spread that a new pheromone lure had appeared and was being sold by ALS. Within an hour a friend of mine, Paul, had ordered one and plans were made. Two days later he received it, borrowed a trap from another patch entomologist and hung it in his garden. 40 minutes later the first patch record was under the belt.  Because of Covid we are not meeting at houses so the plan was to try the Gordano Valley the next morning where 3 of us could keep safely distanced. The first two spots we tried drew a blank along the main tracks so we headed to a likely looking tree. Bearing in mind that we had checked this very tree many times we still thought it a likely site and so Paul hung up the trap. Within 20 mins we had seen three different, individual, moths,

A decent South Westerly blow in summer always has the potential to produce a few manx shearwaters off Clevedon and my favourite watching point is Ladye Bay. The only problem is the extreme distance that they usually pass at. This shot shows the problem:  Look closely and you can just make out the green and yellow bouys that mark the deep channel which is typically what birds follow. Here is a close up of the closer buoy, the green one, Looking closely you can just make out a couple of manxies passing behind this bouy Once you get used to this range it is actually quite difficult to adjust to the much closer birds of the South Western coasts as they seem to go through the scope too quickly at first News of a probable Yelkouan shearwater off Portland was too good an oportunity to miss though and offered the first chance of the year to see numbers of Balearics. The superzoom came in handy and I tried to photograph every shearwater flying in the scrum just off t