Rainfall: 239.6 mm

Temp High: 18.5^oC on 27th

Temp Low: -4.2^oC on 4th

Temp Average: 3.3^oC

After what seems like weeks of rain and snow, there was actually a few hours of dry weather today. We took a walk around the garden as I saw that the winter aconites were flowering in the orchard.

While we were out, we ID'd a few lichens. Christine has been painting some of these in her journal this week and had done a fair bit of preparatory work on the ID's. Our quick search yielded 8 species.

Lastly, this very fine Blue-grey worm, Octolasion cyaneum, had surfaced due to the waterlogged ground.

I've spent the first few weeks of my retirement going through all the dead moths I collected from my moth trap (since 2014) and practicing my dissection technique. I stress that I don't kill anything - they all died of natural causes (I'm deluding myself slightly in that it isn't natural to fly into a moth trap). Anyway, this has provided another 12 species of moth for our garden count taking the total lepidoptera species recorded so far to 539.

Our pond has been frozen since December. The milder weather and heavy rain have opened up a bit of water at the muddy end and hawfinches, blackbirds and bramblings were splashing about in there today.

Up on our triangle of land, I also spotted a grey headed woodpecker - only the second or third time I've seen one of these here. Can't imagine there's much to eat up there.