Wednesday 17 June 2009

Flea in my ear


Uh-oh... As you'll have seen if you follow the Comments here, all my erudition about Prominents yesterday was off the mark. Sticking to my inglorious record of getting identification wrong (my wife says I would be a nightmare police witness - well, officer, he was short but a bit tall, with blond hair which may have been slightly black...), I mistook for an Iron Prominent what is actually a Small Angle Shades (sounds like a product from Christopher Wray). Many apologies. I should have known, as the SAS is another of the regular visitors here which are coming obediently to the trap in more-or-less the same order as they did last year. It features in last year's blog too. Oh well.

As a result of this, I won't dare to identify these glorious insects which always cheer me up when I pass the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as I did last week. In an excellent artistic stroke, the main building is surrounded by sculptures of exotic natural enemies to human health, including a snake but mostly insects.


I specially like the flea or louse, above. If you click on it, it looks like a very nasty version of a pantomime horse, with the legs of two operators sticking out underneath the back. Actually, you don't really need to click on it to get the point, but it makes it even better

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