Saturday, March 1, 2014

Nightmare!

Regret to have to report very high losses of hibernating iris larvae in the wild this winter.  To date well over half the large sample I've been following has been lost, to assumed predation (though one or two lost souls may have moved and may yet reappear).  It looks as though this winter's losses will be the heaviest recorded in five winters of close monitoring. 

We must smash every tit nest box in Britain and set my cat on to them...  Survival is better in cold winters: This winter has been far too mild.

Most of the survivors seen today are greening up, ridiculously early.  One is in late April green already. 

Here are some brave survivors, though they're not supposed to be so bright and green on March 1st -






3 comments:

Neil Hulme said...

Down with tits! Tits out!

Matthew Oates said...

My cat Wizzle caught her first ever bird yesterday, a Blue Tit - so the campaign's on. The wretched bird was Fat Score 0, so stuffed anyway...

But on a serious side, we should not tolerate tit boxes in Emperor woods...

Anonymous said...

Sorry to hear about your loss. Nevertheless, I recently came across this blog and it's great stuff.

I couldn't imagine a better resource for insight about this beautiful species.

Thanks for all your effort, keep on going.