Bats

It hit me the other day that I can no longer hear Bats.. When young I used to hear them flying around the farm house at night, and wondered at my parents inability to hear them.

I have found out that shops in city centres have high pitched noise emitters outside there shops, Old fuddy duddies like my self can happily loiter but not the younger element. how unfair.

Large Blue Butterfly

The life cycle of the Large Blue reveals a devious side to this pretty little creature.

The female lays her eggs on thyme plants. Here it is discovered by the Myrmica Sabuleti ant, which, persuaded by a heady mixture of pheromones and sugars, adopts the caterpillar and takes it back to the nest.When the egg hatches the caterpillar feeds on the thyme for two weeks before falling to the ground.

The caterpillar then sets up camp in a quiet corner of the ants' nest where it spends the next ten months enjoying 'all you can eat' from a buffet of ant eggs and larvae. Eventually surfacing as a butterfly in all its splendour, it lives for just two to five days.

My children and I were out for a short walk when we happened to walk across a ridge by Street, and saw people staring intently at a gorse bush.  We approached and found that they were looking at a rather scruffy butterfly.  This was the incredibly rare Large Blue, which the others there were ready to tell us about.

As an aside, how easy it is to engage in conversation with strangers when you are out walking in the countryside, even if it is just a cheery good morning.  It must be something about urban life that crushes the spirit and turns people into grumpy individuals who scuttle about the streets avoiding eye contact with anyone, like rats.

Learning Humility

Had my son of thirteen years staying with me this weekend and took him fishing on Sutton Bingham.  It was a near perfect day; cloudy sky but settled with enough wind to provide a ripple on the water.  We elected to fish from a boat as my son does not have that much experience with casting and I find that this aspect of fly  fishing really demoralises youngsters who are trying to learn.  If you spend half your time with your line hitting the grass banks behind or getting tangled in trees it is not much fun, neither is was your line collapse in a heap 10 yards of shore where few fish hold.


From a boat the only thing you will hit behind id the water and you do not need the greatest casting in the world.  Most fly fisherman can tell the story of dropping the leader and fly over the edge of the boat while sorting out something else in the craft to find a fish has come right by the boat and taken the fly.


We started to fish along the south side of the lake into a nice bay, my first fish came quickly to an orange blob.  Having forgot the net I had to play him out completely until I could hand him into the boat.  A few minutes later my son was into a fish and seemed to be making a meal of it, but when he finally got the fish to the surface we could see it was a good but bigger than the two pounder I had caught.


As well as being large it was also a strong fighting fish and took my son 15 minutes to bring to the side of the boat.  I had of course forgotten the net so he had to play it out; we had a few heart stopping moments when he got it to the edge of the boat and I reached down only to find the fish had considerable more energy and would take a dive for the bottom again.


As you can see from the photograph he is a very happy fisherman.  His fish weighed four and a half pounds; better than the two I caught put together.

Sutton Bingham

First trip this year to Sutton Bingham, I was surprised how low the water was, but we have not had rain in weeks so I suppose it is hardly surprising.  The sky was over cast when I arrived and the wind was blowing towards the dam wall and onto the south bank.  A number of fishermen were lined out in front of the lodge and most were catching so all the indicators were good.


After chatting with the water bailiff I decided to walk to the point along the south bank,  I fished with my favourite fly; the orange gold head tadpole, I used my Orvis ten foot rod which made battling with the stiff breeze a little easier, I had a few bites and hooked a fish but lost it when I played it near the shore.  It then went very quite so I tried a black nomad but no joy either.


I then changed to an orange blob fly tied to Neil Jones' pattern, this has a foam strip along the top of the hook, the foam extends a little beyond the hook bend. This must make the fly waggle or vibrate in some way as fish usually find it irresistible.

Changing to an intermediate line and wading on the point opposite the yacht club I got into a wind lane and cast out into the middle, I found a slow figure of eight retrieve was effective.  The first fish took after I had let the fly drop for 20 seconds, and just started my retrieve.  After a short battle this lovely 2Ib fish was in the net.  







I was on a two fish ticket and the second fish did not take long to come.  A slow figure of eight retrieve induced a terrific take and after striking, the fish took off striping the line off down to the backing, I very seldom have this when fishing stocked rainbows so I new I had on a good fish on, twice more this fish ran of the depths stripping the line out before the snowbee drag reel started to do its job and tire the fish.  I was grateful to run my small net under the fish and feel the weight of the four and a half pound fish in the mesh.





On closer examination I was very lucky to have landed this fish as the hook was only just in the bottom jaw, my Orvis Western rod is really good at gently playing in fish. In the phot below you can also see Neil Jones' pattern for this blob.  Its the first time I have used this type of fly and it will be going in the favourites box from now on.

Scissor Mole Trap

The Scissor trap is the most commonly used mole trap and has been around for years and years. There are many different designs some better than others.  Things to lookout for when choosing a scissor trap include the spring, which should be of the leaf kind rather than a wire coiled type, prongs on the trap which go straight down rather than curve under and galvanisation which is dull not shiny.  You also have to check that the tongue is secured adequately to the main frame of the trap.  This has been learnt through bitter experience!

You need also to check the prongs on the trap overlap rather than meet together, we want a dead mole not a mangled one. You can see on the pictures below what I mean.

 

Instead of

The most important part of any trap is the trigger mechanism.  Mass produced mole traps are notorious for their stiff mechanisms. This will result in moles stuffing the traps with soil as they go underneath the trap, once they have learnt to do this for one trap they seem to stuff all the traps they come across and are very hard to catch.

If the tongue has metal tabs that can be bent, it is an easy job to bend them in order to achieve a hair trigger on the trap. see the photograph below.

If the tongue has been cast you have to use a file to get the same result; a tiny bit of metal contact holding the jaws apart.

Finally all mole traps should be buried for a couple of weeks to rid them of factory scent.  Mole have incredible noses an detect anything out of order quickly.  It was always said that the man who milked cows was useless as a mole catcher as the scent was transferred to the trap, same for those who smoke.

Red Kites

While back on the farm this week, the aged parents pointed out Red Kites nesting in trees by the lambing shed.  Red Kites have gone from being a very rare sight in Mid-Wales to being very common, especially around Rhayader where the artificial feeding of the Kites for the gawking tourist has meant a leap in population of these raptors.


Red Kites are distinctive because of their forked tail and striking colour - predominantly chestnut red with white patches under the wings and a pale grey head.  They have a wingspan of nearly two metres (about five-and-a-half-feet), but a relatively small body weight of 2 - 3 Ibs.  This means the bird is incredibly agile, and can stay in the air for many hours with hardly a beat of its wings.


Father is pleased as these large birds keep the crows at bay, so this means less damage to lambs is done by these opportunistic black birds.  Crows love to find vulnerable lambs and peck out eyes and navels.  Some Ravens are even worse seeming to delight in pecking out lambs tongues. They don't show that on 'Spring Watch'!


I will be keeping an eye on the kites over the next few months and hopefully they will manage to hatch out a chick, certainly they are undisturbed where they are as its well away from any public highway and the birds are left to get on with their own thing.

Moles

I have been thinking a lot about moles this week.  Not because I have been reading Wind in the Willows, excellent book though it is, rather I have been chatting with a friend who will be leaving the military soon and is retraining as a mole catcher.

As a youngster I considered this the perfect job, but when I came to an employable age I found I had to do other work to make ends meet and my mole catching, was not catching, but poisoning; at that time using strychnine.  I would buy my little pot of poison from Boots and mix it with earth worms then off to some farm to walk miles baiting mole runs with worms. Could you imagine popping into Boots now and asking for strychnine?

Now of course strychnine is banned, and while we may grumble about the pathetic nanny state we live in, which assumes if a person has a gun he will run amok, or if a mole catcher buys poison he will be using it for nefarious purposes, such a finishing off worthless politicians, the up side is the art of mole trapping has come back.

I learnt the art of mole trapping mostly through trial and error.  My father gave me the basics and then I picked the brains of others and read as much as I could on mole trapping, and there was not a great deal in the public library about trapping moles and certainly no internet

I started with two scissor traps bought from the Farm Store, they were heavy, stiff, and the mole had to be built like Arnie to trip them.  I soon learnt that an hours work with a file would would reshape the trigger part of the tongue so that it moved as soon as touched and caused the trap to snap shut immediately.  Another lesson I quickly learnt was; always mark where your mole traps were set. It was most distressing having to spend hours digging in hopeful places trying to locate the mole trap that had disappeared into the ground because a load of sheep had rioted over it or worse cattle.

My father paid me the princely sum of 20 pence each, I think now the cost is £5.00 a mole.  There is nothing like the promise of pocket money to a kid to motivate, and I soon became very good a catching moles and had added to my small collection of traps a Duffus trap which could catch a mole in both ends. This trap too need the judicious application of the file to make it trip easily, and was even harder to find if buried and not marked.

The runs I found by running my the heel of my wellie between two fresh mole hills, by applying pressure you can usually feel the turf give if you are over a run, unless its really deep.  I used a heavy sheaf knife to cut a trap sized hole in the turf and would try and lift the plug out whole.  By using a knife it was usually easy to see the mole run.

These were the basics of catching moles, but the art took much much longer to learn.