Erwain

Moths can be temporarily kept in a fridge for later ID. Two points however:
1. Ensure fridge is cold enough.
2. Keep them in a box without a moth sized hole in the lid.
Ignore & you may later open the fridge to get milk for a cuppa & immediately be assaulted by a face full of moths... 🙈 #moths

For a brief period of time during my undergrad degree I went right off oystercatchers (did a field project on their optimal feeding strategy which was dominated by measuring a *lot* of limpet shells collected from nest sites) but 20 years later I've thoroughly forgiven them & am rather fond of them.

You can't fool me, that's clearly a piece of broken birch twig 😉

The swallows are busy nest building in the toilet block at Martin's Haven. They return every year - I remember them nesting there in the early 90s when I used to go to Skokholm as a teen. #Wales #Pembrokeshire #Birding #Spring #Wildlife #Nature #PembrokeshireCoast

Today's chough looking for lunch. Bit of a hard call as to whether choughs or ravens are my favourite corvid #birding #nature #Wales #PembrokeshireCoast

Perfect weather for Skomer today (and I'm back over on Sunday) and as always the puffins were very obliging. However, before I got on the boat I had an even more obliging chough feeding right next to me on the mainland. Usually I just get them calling overhead when on a run. #birding #Wales #nature

Rude if you ask me.

Here is not a bad part of the world to live. Skylarks sang the sun to sleep this evening and the cliffs are blooming with thrift, sea campion and spring squill #nature #sunset #Wales #thrift

Spring squill is up there near the top of my list of favourite flowers. I'm on the Pembrokeshire coast where it's pretty ubiquitous this time of year and I think I was an adult before I twigged it's not actually as widespread as I grew up assuming (easy to take things for granted!)

Accurate representation of my morning today, during my BTO breeding bird survey. 😉😆 #birdwatching #nature #wildlife #ecologist

@btobirds.bsky.social I've just seen my first swift of the year while at the #NationalBotanicGardenOfWales It's scimitar wings stood out wonderfully compared to adjacent swallows and martins. Looking forward to the screaming sound of summer! #nature #BritishWildlife

Mental health hasn't been great for a while but often a run gives me a brief boost. Today was not one of those days though and it was a grey tinged slog. Sun shone though, & I was serenaded by willow warblers & skylarks, & was shouted at by a chough, the campest of corvids. #trailrun #mentalhealth

A selection of today's #ADHD ( #AuDHD) moments... superglued myself to the glue tube, forgot to eat til 4pm, started task A then got distracted by Task B & forgot Task A existed, sent MIL texts meant for husband, removed Pyrex dish from cupboard but forgot I was meant to hold it so...photo. #tired

As an ecologist who's spent my entire life by the coast my knowledge makes an embarrassingly rapid halt well before the high tide mark. Fortunately my nudibranch loving 16yo makes up for it & we recently shared a fab training day run by the Pembrokeshire Coastal Forum. #MarineBiology #Rockpooling

Morning run internal chat was me wondering why everything felt difficult & that clearly I'm an unfit waste of space, everything is awful, & that rabbit that just sprinted across my path was clearly mocking me.

Then I remembered the two glasses of wine last night. Oops.
#Running #TrailRunning

I've noticed far more inverts (pollinators included) over the past couple of weeks in Pembs than I did during the previous couple of years at this time. (Excluding today's rain which I'm grateful for, the streams having been looking a little shallow and muddy areas hard & rutted). But it's relative.

Very much so :)

Donated another pint of the good stuff today after a 4 year hiatus, in exchange for a pack of 3 gingernuts and two club biscuits. Winning at life. Hopefully my rather boring A+ blood will help three other people win at life too. #BloodDonor #WelshBloodService #GwasanaethGwaedCymru #GiveBlood

Inland for today's #trailrun. The cattle haven't been let out after winter yet so safe for now. Lots of signs of badger activity & birdsong include chaffinch, bullfinch, greenfinch, blackbird, songthursh, robin & goldcrest. Buzzard (Buteo buteo) overhead too #ecologist #nature #birds #outdoors

A short coastpath run today. Skylarks singing, a pair of choughs calling, the fulmurs are gathering in their cliff-ledge colonies - and I'm making the most of my favourite places before the tourists arrive in a couple of months and I retreat. #Nature #TrailRunning #PembrokeshireCoast #Home

Had one in my trap last year. My first (and so far only) one. They're beautiful things.

Definitely a beak and a half! I usually only tend to see them from behind after I've inadvertently flushed them from a soggy patch of undergrowth.

It's my youngest's birthday today & she requested a nature themed/cottage core cake with owls. I've always made my kids' birthday cakes with varying levels of decorating "success", but this one I'm proud of. Much like an excited 5yo with a painting they did - Look! Look at it! 😂 #nature #cake

They really are. 😁

Aww, look at that greater tussock sedge, being all great and tussocky. It's like the Cousin It of the plant world.

#nature #plants #botany

Catching up with the news, a thing I normally avoid for my own mental health. However, today I learnt that a good way to enrage Trump and his supporters is to publicly ask them to be kind?

I think I'll go back to avoidance, and stick with the birds and botany (and being kind).

All about the #birds atm. I've been seeing (and hearing) so many more bullfinches recently - more than I usually see in winter. I found a couple of goldfinch feathers yesterday too, tiny golden treasures. #nature

Coastpath run this morning accompanied by all the usual - chough, wheatear, skylark, linnet, stonechat...There's a lot of redwing about at the moment as well. Also managed not to fall down any remnants of Pembrokeshire's C19th coal mining past, which is always nice 😉 #trailrunning #nature #history

Had the Night Nobbler trail event tonight - the state of my shoes *after* I'd "run" through a stream near the finish 😂 always a bonkers event - woods, Estuary, calf deep mud, fallen trees, samba band, powder paint, mid-wood rave, fire poi, & prosecco half a mile from the finish. #TrailRunning

Cold, crisp night tonight for a late night bimble with the two idiot spaniels. Jupiter, Saturn, Mars & Venus all bright and clear in the sky at once (Jupiter & Venus very much so, Mars pinky-orange, & Saturn a star-like point at 10 o'clock to Venus). Saw a shooting star speed by and fade away too. 😍