I visited the old spoil tips of the former Bedwas colliery this afternoon. It's seven years since I last posted details of a visit and it's worth noting that the site has changed since then. There has been some reprofiling of the tip which has left areas devoid of vegetation. Furthermore, there has been considerable erosion of some areas and in others the vegetation has matured so that some previous open grass areas have been lost. This change to the site's habitat since 2015 has no doubt had an impact on insect life. This might therefore go some way to explain the reduction in the number of species recorded today, shown below with (May 2015) numbers in brackets.
Dingy Skipper x14 (x26), Common Blue x6 (x17), Small Copper (x2), Large and Small White, Mint moth (Pyrausta aurata) and x20+ Gorse Pod Moth (Cydia succedana).
It seems hard to believe it, but the MMBG blog has been up and running for 10 years. In that time there have been 872 posts by members and the site has been viewed an impressive 180,245 times. Earlier this week at the Group's AGM there was support for members to use the blog more to share their moth and butterfly sightings. This was in part in recognition that the Group's Newsletter was unlikely to be published as regularly in the future and the blog provided an alternative communication channel, which was immediate.
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