The Natural History Museum, London

Soon I will be garden-less and therefore unable to rear caterpillars myself. To make up for this I am considering volunteering for a few hours a week at the Butterfly House at the Natural History Museum in London's South Kensington.



They also have many other interesting exhibits on, the following caught my eye:

- Interactive Climate Change Wall

- The Darwin Centre

Check them out if you're in the area.

My passion (outside work)

Im not sure if I mentioned this but I am rather nutty about Lepidoptera. My withdrawal symptoms from rearing moths in New Zealand has left me with a desire to aquire some seasonal fluttery pets back in the UK. I now have some bedroom companions consisting of multiple Peacock butterfly pupae and the odd Elephant Hawkmoth caterpillar. After five days in my company (probably about 10 days altogether) they are emerging (as I write). Here are some pictures:







If you are keen on rearing butterflies/moths/stick insects yourself you can obtain them (amongst other sites) from:

Kew's contribution to the Year of Biodiversity

One of my favourite haunts whilst in London is the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. Steeped in history, Kew is a botanists utopia. They too are running event for the 'Year of Biodiversity' which I may try and make tomorrow. NB Below is a picture which is really unrelated to this post, but it was taken at Kew, its the Titan Arum. This largest single flower in the world wreaks of rotting flesh to attract pollinators, gross yet pretty impressive.



They even have a butterfly and bug exhibit on in the Princess of Wales glasshouse, always a spectacle!

Did you know that were mid way through the 2010 International Year of Biodiversity?

A recent newsletter from the Maungatautari Ecological Island Trust (one of my field sites in the Waikato) brought to my attention one of the positive cases of conservation being undertaken globally. More information about worldwide events can be found at:

Summer time again (5th in a row)

With the 2009/2010 field season wrapped up in New Zealand I'm now back in the UK to move on to the next stage of my project, data analysis. This being a more desk-based approach to research, I will start to investigate what trends (if any) are occuring in these data. More on this in a few months..

Returning to London brings with it the opportunity to become a working member of my supervisors research group at Silwood Park, attend a broad range of seminars at Imperial and will stimulate me to get up to speed with British research into climate change. My first brief forray of the news pages yielded information on climate policy. The new UK governmnent pledges to become the "greenest ever", and the recent greenhouse gas emission stats certainly support this, being down 8.6% this year. Whether this is largely down to 'the recession' is still debateable but it certainly is encouraging to see a move in the right direction in the 'International Year of Biodiversity'.