Seasons

Wildlifeinsight.com wishes everyone a happy New Year. Looking back, 2012 started so promisingly for us with the amazingly early Speckled Wood butterfly recorded in our garden in Falmouth on the 13th of January.

Then, following an early Spring heatwave, it was down hill all the way. The wettest year on record had a detrimental impact on many species. Birds struggled to rear broods and moth and butterfly records were generally abysmal.

If finding the species wasn’t difficult enough then photographing them in the often appalling weather and light conditions was really frustrating.

However, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Cornish Chough had their best year since recolonising Cornwall and Cirl Bunting appear to have established a sustainable Cornish population. Also it was heartening to see monthly unique visitors visiting Wildlifeinsight.com exceed 20,000 for the first time.

We were also delighted to receive well over 100 caterpillar identification requests of which, hopefully, over 80% were successfully identified. We were more than satisfied with this success rate considering that the majority were dependant on trying to arrive at identifications from emailed descriptions and not photos.

Several of those caterpillars identified certainly made us extremely envious such as those of two Goat moths and a Convolvulus Hawk-moth. See link to Convolvulus Hawk-moth.

Many thanks to all who sent in identification queries.

We were also grateful to be able to add a little sunshine to the site by posting images of moths and birds from other parts of the world including South Africa and the Northern Territory of Australia. Hopefully we will be able to add a bit more variation from other parts of the world to the site this year.

We also welcomed a huge increase in the number of requests for the use of wildlife photographs and it is fascinating to see the diverse range of publications and organisations contacting us worldwide.

Many thanks to everyone and please continue to follow Wildlifeinsight, there are exciting things afoot, such as news of a new Cornish butterfly breeding project. 2013 is going to be better – its got to be, hasn’t it?