To find out I went to the Information centre in Salt’s Mill. At first they thought I was crazy – asking if they knew what the Green Octopus was all about. Is the Dog in the Dinghy part of the same thing? After I pointed them to my website they went off to make a phone call and came back with a leaflet about the trail.

I don’t think I am spoiling things by posting photos here. Hopefully it might even get people more interested. There are still a couple to be installed and several still need painting but it looks great.

Pirate Ship

Sign

Salt Pot Slug

Tortoises

Tortoises

Fish and Drawers

Fish

Bird

Bird

Skater Frog

Snowman

Submarine

Submarine

Frog on a Leaf

Frog on a Leaf

An extra one

It was quite cold and wet after heavy rain earlier in the day so we didn’t really expect to see any. One reason for going was to see where I could expect to find them when the conditions were better. However we had not been looking for long when we found one.

According to Susan they can be found sheltering in the extraction pits on the Moor near Bilberry. And she was right. Even though the Bilberry is not as “far on” as you would expect for this time of year.

Peter Hughes found the next one in amongst the grass in the shelter of another extraction pit.

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?

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.

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.

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.

This is one of my favourite shots.

As usual you can click on the image to view it, and others, larger at flickr.

A couple of others I like are:-

and