The good, the bad and the reverse sweep.

Pam's got a little vegetable patch going and she is producing some nice fresh greens. Every day she's been looking through the leaves and eliminating any butterfly eggs, or so she thought.

Yesterday we found some more Large White eggs and alas, some large white caterpillars as well.

Annulet (Charissa obscurata)

I had a bit of a lie in this morning, so it was about seven a.m when I started on my moth traps. It wasn't fantastic, but there was a new species for the garden, an Annulet. This moth likes coastal areas and its main food plant is Heather, but it does use other herbaceous plants as well.

Conobathra tumidana

The family of pyralid moths may not seem as exciting as the Hawk-moths but in their own way these are just as fascinating. I don't find them easy to identify but this small moth, about 1 cm long, has a nice row of raised scales to help identify it.

Once I'd finished the moths and had breakfast I checked the Cricket score at Canterbury and saw that Middlesex were in a sorry way. After sorting a few other things out I decided to go along to spend the afternoon watching Kent murder their bowling. After all they are bottom of the table and we are top. But it didn't work out that way.

After a while in the sun I sought refuge in the members stand, where this House Martins nest was active. There weren't in and out very often, I guess they may be on a second clutch of eggs.

Darren Stevens nudges this round the corner to reach his 50. Unfortunately but this time we'd already lost eight wickets, and only a good stand with Simon Cook had allowed Stevens to reach 50.

This very ugly reverse sweep led to Stevens being last one out, caught behind off his glove.

You could say that this juvenile Herring Gull came into the ugly category, but I think he was expressing the crowds boredom as Middlesex had scored at less than 2 an over for the first 10 overs of their second innings.

Mum came down to join in, and may have had the desired affect when young Compton was brilliantly caught by Geriant Jones. At the close they were 50-1. I bet the KCCC hope that the two teams will bat a bit better in the second innings. With it being the Canterbury Cricket Week I'm sure a two day finish would be pretty expensive. The good news is that the umpires think that the 21 wickets (including four run-outs) were due to bat batting and won't be reporting the wicket.