Late afternoon sunlight on the canal often looks great and it is even better to see the Geese, Goslings and people enjoying it.

Take your pick, what do you want to call them?

I drove past Baildon Bridge last night and saw a yellow thing on the end of the wall that I was sure I had “miss-seen”. I mean, why would a yellow octopus be on the wall of the bridge over the River Aire?

But then why would a green octopus be on the wall by the canal at Saltaire?

I have just been through my various passwords and tightened them all up. I have also removed “admin” accounts from my sites. Something that was long overdue and was annoyingly exploited by a hacker.

Doing this tidying up did not take long, it took me a bit longer to find out what had been done to my WordPress sites – this one and Friends of Baildon Moor. When using the Twenty Twelve template the main page just displayed a “Hacked” message yet when I looked at the page source code everything looked normal. Firebug, or the tools in Chrome, showed just the hack message as the page. This at first didn’t make sense but I now realise that the hack was creating a new document.

I assumed that the hack was in the php or css files for the template and used WinMerge to look for differences. I have a cron job that sends me a list of files with a modified date/time within the last day, nothing was in the list so I assumed the hacker had been clever with the dates on the files.

Though the wind from the West was quite strong it was still sunny this afternoon (4 May) so I went up onto the moors for a while. I was quite pleased that I did because I saw my first female Wheatear for this year.

I also managed to get a Swallow within the frame. It’s a very blurry picture but it is an early Swallow for me. Perhaps I will get better ones as the Spring progresses.

A rather mean looking Herring Gull (I think) also flew over.

Hopefully this Summer will be better than last year’s.

Last Saturday (27 April) I spent longer on Baildon Moor than I had done for a month or two. There was a cold wind but when it dropped or I was sheltered the sun was warming.

I went North West over Glovershaw way and round the edge of the moor going North. Even though I kept to the paths I still disturbed a few Meadow Pipit. It is easy to see how having dogs run around during the nesting season can empty areas of nesting birds. Only one person was letting his dogs run off into the long grass, he was throwing a ball into it for them. All the others kept to the paths and still had plenty of exercise.

I could hear several Skylark and on a couple of occasions saw little fluttery dark shapes up in the sky. Several Lapwing were also wheeling about and giving their eerie call. The first bird I managed to get a decent photo of though was a Curlew that was on a small mound.

And on the way back it was there again

At the top left corner a couple of Pied Wagtails were feeding and either collecting nesting material or collecting long legged insects to feed their young. Probably the former. This was over the other side of the wall were the collapsing shelters are.

Following a path round the edge of the moor up around the 11th Tee there were a couple of Peacock butterflies, one of which was warming itself in the Sun.

A little further round, at the small wooded area, I could hear several Chaffinches and Willow Warblers and managed to get a couple of decent shots of them.

And then on the way back, just before I saw the Curlew again, a Meadow Pipit sat on the wire long enough for me to get a shot. The length of their rear claws is amazing.