I’m pleased to say I wrapped up¹ a project this weekend: a dedicated spot for a light trap. After years of trying out different places on my property, this one’s consistently proven to bring in the widest variety of species. Plus it’s a discrete enough location that the light doesn’t anger my neighbours too much. Always a plus.

We dubbed it the “moth gallows” due to the obvious resemblence. Irony abound, I suppose, since I only use live-traps. The photos here show my standard lepiled setup.

Truth is, this project killed two birds with one stone. For a couple of years we’d been having problems with our septic backing up – yup, what joy. The roots of an old 100ft Douglas fir (shown on the far right of the second shot) had grown and warped our pipes, preventing proper outflow. Cutting down the tree would have felt downright indecent (hell, it was here before we were), so instead I rented a jackhammer to cut through the bedrock and create a place re-position the pipes. The only problem was it ran right over my favourite mothing spot. So, I put in a boardwalk and raised platform to hide it all from view, preventing foot traffic crushing the pipes under the ground, and give me space for a proper spot for a light. I’m pretty happy with the result.

It was a fun project, but great to finally complete. Let’s see what it catches this year.

1. Oh fine, fine. I still have maybe an hour’s worth of work finishing the cross-hatch siding around the full thing. But it looks done, which it what counts. ↩︎