charlie-walker

This was a pretty eventful week, I talked to a farmer on a new property for me. He had a great story about how the swallows every year around this time start lining up on the telephone wires. It begins with one or two and then as the weeks go on he gets more and more. He says they glean the fields and eat. I wonder if the birds all show up for the food and then make there way back home to San Juan Capistrano for the winter. I wonder if it’s like our Portuguese festas where we all show up, eat, and migrate to the next one.
Well like I told you everyday as a bug trapper I am looking for a needle in a haystack. The scavanger hunt today was like the day you go to the house and the lady at the door has everything you need. I walked over to my gypsie moth trap which is in the middle of Gursky Ranches walnut orchard. I walked up to the trap and looked in to see a Gypsy moth in the trap. At first I thought, wow! It was much bigger then I expected. It was easy to identify with it brush like atennas. You can’t mistake it for anything else. So I took the trap down and called our office to report the find. Then I was back on my way. I got to this site that is new - it’s an area that I had set a new trap in. I looked in the melon trap and sure enough there was a Melon Fruit Fly. In my Med Fly trap there were pieces of a Med fly, it had been twenty days since my last rotation so a spider had been feeding on it. If I hadn’t seen parts of the wings I might not have brought it in to be identified. I also found a Oriental Fruit fly in my OF trap. It is really fun to find the bugs that the State puts out for you. I was really afraid that I would miss them but I got lucky and didn’t miss any. I will be taking pictures so you can see them soon.