Birds, Leps, Observations & Generalities - the images and ramblings of Mark Skevington. Sometimes.

Wednesday, 19 July 2017

More Banana-ing

I can't quite believe how simple and effective this 'hanging a banana off a bush' technique (banana-ing) is - certainly feels more immediately successful than sugaring in my garden at least.

First night up : a just-ripe banana
Old Lady x1

Second Night up : now a sun-ripened and fly/wasp chewed banana
Old Lady x1
Copper Underwing agg. x2
Dun-bar x1
Blastobasis adustella x4
Red-barred Tortrix x4
Endotricha flammealis x1

Third night (tonight so far) :  banana getting quite brown now
Old Lady x1
Copper Underwing agg. x5
Dark Arches x2
Mother of Pearl x1

Not to mention the numerous flies and wasps that I'm only seeing a fraction of late in the day - wonder what else has been on it! I'm going to leave it up as long as it seems to be working.





The garden trap was busy last night with warm humid conditions and the threat of thundery downpours. In the end we got the downpour at around 03:30 but no thunder and lightning show. I'd constructed an additional rain cover over the trap which worked well - no apparent impact on trap effectiveness and no rain-soaked egg trays. Another Gelechia rhombella plus a few new for year species - all safely recorded on my dictaphone, but I do need to work on catching up on my record entries for the last couple of weeks.

No trapping tonight - too knackered!

Ruby Tiger

3 comments:

Gibster said...

Being without a light trap, I'm really rather thrilled to learn of this banana business. Cheers buddy, I'm gonna give that a whirl. Presumably fermenting apples will do the trick too? :)

Skev said...

Probably ..... but nothing beats an Old Lady sucking your banana.

Gibster said...

Speaking from personal experience, I couldn't agree more heartily. Gawd bless ya, Skev. You bring hope into my Old Lady free life xx