Moscerini Safari

Today we went on an adventure to the end of our property to visit with and feed the local wildlife. Every day after picking up the grapes some lucky individual gets to visit with the illustrious moscerini, and take them their afternoon snack. Today, as with every day, it was grape skin, grape stems, and grape seeds. We helped prepare the snack with great hope that the moscerini would visit while we deposited the food.

To prepare moscerini food, one must first pick a lot of grapes. They can be lombrusco, trebbiano, or salamino-must be native to this particular region. After the grapes are picked (usually it takes about 4 hours) they are pressed, to get rid of the juice (The moscerini do not like the juice.). We then carefully remove the leftover skins from the pressing machine-every bit is very precious. Please note pictures for a better illustration.

After this process, the food is loaded onto a large cart, which is pulled by the tractor to the moscerini feeding grounds. (This area is specially designed and located to attract the beautiful moscerini.)
Every possible step is taken to care for the food during transport. As you can see, Heli and I are carefully guarding the food against any possible predators.

Once we arrived at the feeding grounds, cameras in hand, the show began! We added the food to the existing pile and were blessed to view several ephemeral moscerini.

What an experience! I know that I will remember it my whole life. We did our best to capture the moment on film but as you can see the moscerini are rather difficult to point out. If you look carefully though, you might be able to glimpse one or two!