Like many people my journey started with rearing butterflies and moths in pickle jars working my way up from large whites and garden tigers to Sphingidae and exotic Saturnids. Four years in teacher training college convinced me that teaching was the last thing I wanted to do and I managed to swing a job in a small provincial British seaside natural history museum. Twenty years of that lead me nowhere so me and my wife moved to New Zealand where I dabbled in various engineering type occupations. I’m retired now and have plenty of time to rue my misspent youth, whist I largely spend my time trying to create a habitat more welcoming to wildlife than the five acres of grass and gorse which comprised our property when we bought it 20 years ago. I think we are succeeding slowly but I will be finished before it is. Our five acres is the only place I record from as I seldom go anywhere else. I’ve returned to keeping things in jars again and am a keen photographer and would-be bonsai artist. I would like to thank my long suffering wife for putting up with my jars and not having the house sprayed for spiders, and the people who identify my observations as I really struggle with the local invertebrate fauna.
Tony Bailey