I wrapped up a project this weekend: a dedicated spot for a light trap on my property. After years of trying out different places, this one’s consistently proven to bring in the widest variety of species – and it’s in discrete enough of a 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 freezing in the winter and 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 channel to re-place the pipes. The only problem was that 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 put in the platform at the end to house a permanent location for a trap. Not bad. I’m pretty happy with the result.

Let’s see what it catches this year.