Thursday, July 14, 2005

Butterfly recovery agent

I have become the unofficial butterfly recovery agent for the site as there are large numbers that become trapped in the screens around the gas coolers. My first tasks in the morning are to check the status of the turbines, check out the plumes of oil mist from the oil mist (so called) eliminators, and then I go onto rescue the moths and butterflies that are stuck against the mesh on the fan guards. The fans are huge in banks of 3 and cover a huge area and the effective capture area is huge, the problem is that the numbers of captureds moths and butterflies are such that I need a capture box in which to keep them and to be able to release them far enough away so that they do not fly straight back into the screens. I did mention that it was a feeding station for the bats in the area as I found a huge amount of guano but it has since been pointed out to me that in fact it is not bats but huge toads that some in throngs to feel like crazy and I have even found their hiding place, they have manged to dig under the concrete paths and create little tunnels in which they sit during the day and emerge at night, tricky little things they must be stuffing themselves all night long on the myriad of moths that fly into the illumination zone. I suspect the guys in the control room are watching me on the close circuit television, and laughing there asses off at me but to a true blue conservationist that doesn’t worry me at all. The biggest problem I have is what to do with all the specimens of the dead butterflies and moths I am collecting, I have a small desk and it is full and I think I ma going to have to be ruthless and just photograph them all and discard the corpses to the ants.

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