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A bridge camera for a troubled author
Back in August 2019, before our last trip abroad (a wildlife and yoga holiday organised and run by friends), I bought a bridge camera. Much lighter in the luggage and easier to handle when trekking about in the Greek heat. Well, that was the plan. In the end, I couldn’t bear not having a decent camera and lens for all the birds – Eleanora’s Falcon, Bee-eater, Sardinian Warbler, Blue Rock Thrush, Red-rumped Swallow, Lesser Kestrel, Honey Buzzard, Black Stork, and many others. So, I took my old Canon 6D and the Sigma 150-600mm. I wouldn’t have realistically got the shots I did even with the so-called ...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - July 16, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Photography Source Type: blogs

Cleaning up a Least Weasel with Firefly
While we were standing on the ditch-bridge beyond the old, stilted Rothschild’s Bungalow at Woodwalton Fen National Nature Reserve trying to catch a glimpse of the Purple Emperors wheeling high above is in the oak trees, a mammal squeaked near our feet and poked its head out to see what all the fuss was about. It was a Least Weasel, it seems. Least Weasel at Woodwalton Fen NNR Its scientific name is Mustela nivalis, although it is often known as the Little Weasel, Common Weasel, or in some places simply a Weasel. In the US the term weasel is more generic and applies to a whole range of creatures. Not to be confused w...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - July 14, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Artificial Intelligence Photography Vertebrates Source Type: blogs

A micro moth, relatively new to science
The rate at which I’m seeing new moth species in the garden has been somewhat slow this year. Obviously, in my first couple of years mothing, I saw dozens and dozens I’d never seen before. In fact, most of the moths I saw early on were all new to me. I think the garden list got to about 350 species after the first three years. In subsequent, years, I’d see double figures of new moths, at least 127 NFM in 2018, 125+ NFM in 2019, and so on. 2022 was a good year, 64 NFM with the last new one of the year being at the end of October, December Moth! Anarsia innoxiella (Gregersen & Karsholt, 2017) So far in ...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - July 10, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

Stiffkey Spoonies and Trimingham Bee-eaters
We took our first camping trip to Stiffkey for several years. Torrential rain and wind during the first night, but better, brighter, hotter days to follow, mostly. Mrs Sciencebase spotted Spoonbills at North Fen Stiffkey on Tuesday night before the rain, so we headed that way the next morning and discovered a flock of around 16 or 17. Alongside Cormorant and Avocet. Spoonbill in flight The next day’s walk took us west to Wells-next-Sea where there was another flock of 14 or so. Spoonbill in flight, showing breeding plumage In between those two sightings, however, we had headed for the quarry at Trimingham further alo...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - July 7, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Birds Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

Boosting a shady Scarlet Tiger moth
I visited Chippenham Fen NNR. Hoping to see Purple Emperor and seeing a solitary White Admiral instead. Also saw the nationally rare, fenland Silver-barred moth, and lots of Scarlet Tiger moths. It was a grey day by the time I got a snap of a Scarlet Tiger nectaring (one of the only moths of this group in the UK that can feed as an adult). Of course, being a grey day, the light levels were low below a bank of trees with the favoured thistles. DxO PureRaw3 can save you three full ISO stops of noise As you can see from the left-hand portion of this photo, there was a lot of noise in the image. I used DxO PureRaw 3 (right-han...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - July 3, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Photography Source Type: blogs

Chippenham Fen National Nature Reserve
Having spent Saturday morning with the Coton Orchard mothing team, I missed out on a Butterfly Conservation mothing and butterflying event at Chippenham Fen NNR, which overlapped. So, I headed up to the Fen on the Sunday morning. I spent a couple of hours there after a horrendous number of detours to find the place. Once on the site, I spotted lots of very flitty and active Ringlet butterflies, numerous Skippers, and a single White Admiral high overhead. Unfortunately, didn’t see any Purple Emperor butterflies, which had been my primary target. I hadn’t realised that this Fen is a site for Scarlet Tiger moth o...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - July 2, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Birds Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

Mothing at Coton Orchard
I helped out at my first public moth event and bioblitz on 1st July at the wonderfully serene Coton Orchard, a couple of clicks west of central Cambridge. It’s a mature and well-established early twentieth century orchard with great soil and a lot of biodiversity, Anna Gazeley told me at the event. Plenty of wild blackthorn growing on patches that no longer host apple trees and several areas of rewilding and meadow creation underway. There were dozens of Marbled White, Small Skipper, Meadow Brown, and Small Heath butterflies enjoying the meadows while Buzzards circled the thermals overhead. Marbled White butterfly Co...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - July 2, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

Five years and finally a public mothing
UPDATE: I helped out at a public moth event and bioblitz this morning at the wonderfully serene Coton Orchard, 2-3km west of central Cambridge. It’s a century-old orchard with great soil and a lot of biodiversity, Anna Gazeley told me at the event. It is, unfortunately threatened by what can only be described as a wholly inappropriate, costly, and ten-years out-of-date transport-infrastructure project for Cambridge. All in the name of sustaining Cambridge’s purported 15-minute city ethos. Privet Hawk-moth on privet stem Anyway, there was a good crowd of people of all ages who turned up quite early on a Saturday...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - June 30, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

Five years of mothing
If you’ve been here a while, you will know that in July 2018, I acquired a moth trap, became quickly fixated on this other world of nocturnal Lepidoptera, and have logged and photographed the species that turn up in my garden and that I see elsewhere ever since. Almost fanatically, Mrs Sciencebase would say… Pine Hawk-moth I did an audit of my logs at the end of June ahead of my five-year anniversary as a moth-er on 24th July. So, I’m writing this post on the 30th June and will update as July gets underway. At the time of writing, I have recorded 448 moths in my South Cambridgeshire garden, mainly drawn t...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - June 30, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

Feed the birds … twenty quid a bag …
Food for the garden birds is rather pricey. Certainly not the tuppence-a-bag of the song from Mary Poppins. Admittedly, the bags you buy are a lot more heavily laden with various seeds and grains. Anyway, discussion is ongoing in my Wild Fen Edge group about when to feed garden birds, so here are some thoughts. Birds need to eat all year round. So, I put food out all the time – mixed seed peanuts, nyjer seeds, fat balls, flutter butter. Different places in the garden, different heights if possible, near obvious perching points, higher than cat access, some out in the open. Also, not too many feeders close together to...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - June 28, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Birds Source Type: blogs

Tinea pellionella – The Case-bearing Clothes Moth
I spotted something moving very slowly along a wall in the house this morning and took a close look. I thought maybe it was a bagworm at first, but a couple of experts on Twitter, Colin Foote @MothIDUK and Richard Lewington confirmed it as the larva of the Case-bearing Clothes Moth, Tinea pellionella. These are sometimes colloquially known as bagworms, but they’re not fully fledged bagworms, that word is reserved for a group of moths known as the Psychids. Now, I’ve almost certainly seen the adults of this species, although there are several very similar Tinea adults that are almost indistinguishable, so I cou...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - June 26, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Sciencebase Source Type: blogs

(Almost) 500 moths in five years
As I approach my fifth anniversary as a mother, my tally shows that I have recorded and photographed almost 500 species. The most recent was new to my garden – The Leopard Moth, Zeuzera pyrina. Leopard Moth. Its forewings with flapping very rapidly, but flash and a fast shutter froze teh action There are several things of interest about this moth aside from the fact that it’s fairly large and white with spots of black (almost metallic blue, in some cases). First is that the adults, the flying creatures, as opposed to the larvae (caterpillars) have no working mouth parts and so cannot eat. There are several othe...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - June 20, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs

How to make your hoverflies pop
I don’t often take photographs of hoverflies, first off, they rarely sit still long enough for me to get a shot. Anyway, I was trying to find butterflies* to photograph at Trumpington Meadows, near Cambridge, and bumped into one the university profs carrying a net. He was hoverflying. We had a good chat about insects. I later shared my photo of a Pied Plumehorn hoverfly, which I’d snapped a little after we went our separate ways. He seemed to like the photo and asled me about my photographic equipment, he having gone from a Canon 60D dSLR to a mirrorless R5, and wondering about getting better results than he wa...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - June 18, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Photography Source Type: blogs

Digital photography file formats
I often refer to the various file formats used in digital photography and image editing and thought some Sciencebase readers might be interested in a very brief summary of what those formats are about. Fundamentally, I shoot in RAW and process with DxO PureRaw 3 followed by Topaz Sharpen AI (not every time) and PaintShop Pro. The final images I share are usually resized to 2048 pixel-width, unless I’ve had to crop it to smaller than that, and compressed to 90% JPG quality. You can think of RAW as being a digital film negative (although the colours are not inverted) and every other format is like a print from that neg...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - June 17, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Photography Source Type: blogs

Of moths and box
This is a female Box-tree Moth. They were inadvertently brought into the UK in 2007 on imported, exotic Box plants. They are spreading rapidly and I see lots in Cottenham. I don’t think they’ve got as far north as Ely yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Female Box-tree Moths lack the male’s hair pencil at the end of the abdomen The female lays her eggs on Box plants and her larvae will ravage the plant, you’ll see the damage pretty quickly. In their native environment the moths are kept in check somewhat by the ecosystem itself, but that doesn’t happen here. I have warned people not to ...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - June 16, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Lepidoptera Source Type: blogs