I’ve always been a fairly good swimmer and enjoy swim sessions in the pool, but driving back and forth to Aberystwyth to get to the pool is a bit of a pain.
I’ve therefore ordered myself a wetsuit and cap so that I can do some open-water swim training here in Borth and Ynyslas. I’m hoping to be able to use my Garmin Forerunner whilst I swim so that I can see how far / fast I go and with water all around us there should be plenty of places to swim.
I don’t know how well it will compare with swimming in the pool when it comes to quality swim training as the external factors of wind, tides, waves and of course the cold will all affect my swims but it should be fun. When it is calm I’ll be able to swim along the beach off the seafront, but as I’d like to swim in flatter water where possible I’ll probably head to the estuary and swim there instead. There are also a few buoys in estuary that I should be able to swim between / around which will allow me to do intervals and reproducible sessions.
I might also try swimming in the River Leri as it will be nice and calm there, although the currents will add to the fun! There are plenty of lakes in the hills around here too that I’m sure I will have to swim at some point. It may not be the best time of year to start as it’s going to start getting cold, but what better way to start the day than a cold 5am swim in the sea.
It seems as though there is a quite an few people into outdoor swimming or wild swimming and plenty of websites with information on doing it and where you can swim.
Wild Swimming has lots of information. It is trying to sell you a book about Wild Swimming but the website has lots of freelay available information as well.
The Outdoor Swimming Society has a nice website with lots of information too, including maps of places to swim, events and tips.
Hopefully as well as having some fun and exploring some new places from a slightly wetter perspective than usual, it will help with my swim fitness as well. Once a week at swim fit just isn’t enough to keep my swimming as good as it should be.
I’ve been using Dropbox for a while as a really useful way of sharing files with clients, friends and family. It’s very clever in the way it works with a nice little menu item on my computer that links directly to my local dropbox folder. Anything I put in that folder get automatically synced to my dropbox in ‘the cloud’, creating an online copy of the files and a way of sharing those file with others. I can obviously control who can access the files and which files / folders are shared or not shared.
I’ve recently been working on a publication for a client and have been presenting them with a pdf file of the document as it progressed. Initially I’d been doing this by providing them with a CD containing the file, but they wanted a few amendments made to the original file today so I added it to my dropbox and provided them with a link. It’s a 50 page document and the file was about 40Mb in size so the initial upload took about 30 minutes on my (not very fast) broadband connection. I then noticed a small error in the file, corrected this which took a few seconds and then had to re-upload it to dropbox.
I was expecting the upload to take 30 minutes or so again as I assumed that the original pdf file would have to be overwritten with the amended one, but somehow, and I have no idea how they do this, the upload only took a few seconds. There’s some clever voodoo going on there as the upload process must have examined the contents of the pdf file and uploaded just the changes! I can understand how it would only need to upload any files that had been changed, but quite how it only needs to upload the changes WITHIN a file is beyond me. That’s pretty clever if you ask me and adds yet another reason why I like Dropbox!
You can try it out by signing up for a free account here. You may just like it!
The Chamomile Shark moth that I caught last month has made it to the BBC. Article here and Slideshow here.
Hopefully the article will encourage a few more people to buy a moth trap and start moth trapping in Ceredigion, or prompt people who have been recording moths in the county to submit them to our new Ceredigion Moth Group and the County Recorder.
The new Chamomile Shark record only gets a passing mention and they don’t say that it was me who caught it, but that doesn’t really matter.
It does matter that it took quite a number of requests for them to acknowledge the copyright on my photos and to link to my website – which were the terms I presented them with when I granted them permission to use the photos. At first they used the photos but didn’t add the acknowledgments or link. It’s not that big a deal I know, but the BBC should know better and should be careful with copyright and acknowledgments. I did get them to acknowledge my photos in the end and eventually to add a link as well.
Gold spot
National Moth night is this coming weekend, May 15th to be precise. It is an annual event that is the UK’s celebration of moths and moth recording. The date varies each year to focus recording efforts on different parts of the season.
To take part in National Moth Night 2010 all you need to do is record the moths you encounter on the 15th May. This might be moths recorded in a garden trap, or you could build a makeshift trap just for the night. A porch light may attract moths, or a bright torch shone onto a white sheet in the garden. You can of course buy relatively inexpensive moth traps and you can find out more about these in my post from last year about buying a moth trap.
There are always a good number of public events you can attend, and the best place to find out what’s happening is the official National Moth Night website at http://www.nationalmothnight.info/events/public.php.
This year the theme of National Moth Night 2010 is Moths and Bats, so it is being run in collaborating with the Bat Conservation Trust. People are therefore being encouraged to look out for bats as well as moths.
Personally I shall be away from home on Saturday so will be taking my Moth Trap with me and will be recording in Gloucestershire rather than Ceredigion for a change. No doubt I’ll get some different moths in the trap rather than the usual suspects.
Just be warned though, we went to a public event for National Moth Night 2009 and have been trapping moths ever since!
It seems as though the photos of the mating pair of Dasystoma salicella moths I took at the weekend have been in demand. I posted one of them on a forum and immediately had a couple of people ask if they could use it for their own personal records. Obviously I didn’t mind and sent them copies of the photos.
Since then I’ve been in contact with Ian at UK Moths who had photos of the larval stage, but not the adults of Dasystoma salicella, so the UK Moths website is now using my photo to illustrate the species. In addition, Mike from Hants Moths was in a similar position and requested use of the photo too.
If only I had realised that it was such an un-photogenic species at the time, I may have spent a little more time and effort getting a few more shots.
Amorous Couple - Dasystoma salicella
As you may know from recent posts I’ve started moth trapping and have been part of the formation of the Ceredigion Moth Group. It’s all a little ‘geeky’ but I quite enjoy the moth trapping, as does Morgan and learning more about the creatures around us is always a good thing. Keeping records of them and submitting them to the various interested parties makes it all feel a little more worthwhile, and in a small way these activities may help with the conservation of rare species.
In some respects I would rather be actively contributing to conservation in this way than simply donating money to conservation charities. However, as well as actively taking part in moth counting and submitting results to the Big Garden Bird Watch we also spent some money recently on becoming members of the RSPB and Butterfly Conservation.
RSPB
There are a few RSPB reserves locally and we do often enjoy a short walk at the Ynyshir Reserve, so becoming a member seemed like a sensible thing to do. The membership fees obviously go towards supporting the RSPB which should be the main reason for joining, but you get quite a it for your money too. As well as free entry to their reserves you receive a Quarterly Bird magazine with plenty of interesting articles in it and junior members such as Morgan get a ‘Wild Times’ magazine six times a year, featuring the adventures of Owlbert, Rookie, Red the squirrel and Squeak the mouse. You also get free gifts if you want them and RSPB bird guide book (which I already had).
Obviously you don’t really join for these benefits, but we were pretty interested in what Morgan would get for his membership fee as it is these things that will keep him interested in the wildlife around him.
Butterfly Conservation
The Butterfly Conservation membership is similar. For your fees you receive free entry to their reserves a ‘Butterfly’ magazine three times a year, a welcome pack and a garden butterfiles ID guide, along with advice on attracting butterflies and moths to your garden
Of course, you also get a nice warm feeling at having helped the conservation effort of our wild British birds, butterflies and moths.
Both organisations have decent websites where you can join them or simply donate. They both have lots of information online, not just about the organisations themselves, but about the birds and butterflies of the UK too., so check out their websites and join up too.
As well as attracting lots of wildlife to your garden, a wildlife garden also gives you an excuse to be a bit lazy with the gardening from time to time! It isn’t just about bird boxes and ponds; just as important are areas of unkempt garden and piles of logs and sticks.
We don’t have huge garden here, but it is always nice to see wildlife in it so we do various things to attract wildlife. We have several bird feeders offering peanuts, seeds and fat balls. We have a few areas of unkempt garden with wild flowers and grasses growing in them. We have a little nest box on one of the trees at the bottom of the garden.
As far as maintenance goes, then we try to leave dead seed heads and such like for a while before cutting them back. In fact we try to leave most cutting back until spring. We keep the use of pesticides and other chemicals to a minimum. We also have piles of dead wood, compost bins and heaps of sticks all of which help attract wildlife.
It does work too. We have had 24 species of bird to the garden, frogs, toads and newts, numerous butterflies and moths, grass snakes, and as far as mammals go, hedgehog, rabbit, squirrel, mice, bats and even a ferret!
If you want to know how wildlife friendly your garden is and get more hints and tips then Natural England have set up a website called the Big Wildlife Garden. You can add you garden to it and list the features that you have. Our garden is on there and the latest few things we have done mean we have 53 points and a gold certificate! I think I need to build a bird bath next.
How does your garden fare?
I came across a weblog written by another local resident the other day. I can’t remember how it came to my attention, probably through a ‘Google Alert’ in my inbox, but it was well written with lots of local interest so I had a look through it and then to my surprise found a photo of myself on it.
I don’t get too many photos of me windsurfing so it was good to see it, and good to see that my windsurfing had obviously impressed someone, although I doubt that I was doing 40 mph! Check it out, the weblog entry is ‘Like a Bat out of Hell‘.
Its good to see someone else from Borth with a lively blog too. I would have said ‘it’s a small world’ after seeing myself mentioned on his blog, but I guess anyone who has ever been to Borth already knows that!
It has been a long standing joke in our family that until I was quite old I didn’t realise that Arboretums are where you go to look at trees, I always thought it was where you go to looks at ducks! There is some reasoning behind all of this in that the arboretum on the Isle of Man at St Johns is where me and a lot of others go to feed the ducks. This is what I have done since I was quite little. We never used to look at any of the trees and in fact I would say there are more ducks than trees anyway.
Alan did think it was just me being a bit stupid and was teasing me in front of a few other Manxies, most of which agreed with me and thought the arboretum was for ducks as well.
You can imagine how disappointed I was when we went to Westonbirt Arboretum only to find no ducks!
The next generation of duck loving Manxies are being brought up in the same way I notice. An old friend of mine from the Isle of Man is keeping up with tradition and teaching her son the true purpose of Arboretums as well
OK, OK, don’t get too excited you won’t be seeing us on the TV!
After our recent trip to the Isle of Man I was contacted by someone at the BBC on the island to write a little article about our experiences geocaching on the Isle of Man.
I did, and it is now live on the BBC Isle of Man website. You can see the article here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/isleofman/content/articles/2008/05/23/geo_caching_feature.shtml
