I have decided to abandon my role as a caterpillar parent after a successful attempt at limited freedom while Penny and I were on holiday in Portugal. Albert, my Poplar Hawkmoth cattie (yes, our relationship had developed as far as giving him - or her - a name) survived contentedly in a muslin bag looped round a branch of a willow tree after a precarious adventure on our stepladder.
On our return, inspection of the bag first revealed an impressive number of droppings and then, tucked away among the living leaves - the ones cut for his previous box wilted virtually daily - there he or she was.
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Given our other commitments, I took this as a sign that the fledgling could leave the nest and so here is Albert (or Alberta) below, out in the big wild world at last.
I was promptly rewarded by Penny's discovery of the very fine Grey Dagger cattie shown at the top of this post and below. Munching away quite openly on a beech hedge sapling, it presumably benefits from its bright colouring as a scare mechanism. Don't eat me; I may be poisonous. Its appetite was as voracious as the famous cattie in the children's modern classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Half-an-hour after we took these pics, the leaf being nibbled had disappeared entirely. Earlier, while I was out, it had eaten another one of similar size as its first course.
5 comments:
My Orange tip caterpillars (I grow lady's smock for them) are always called Brian. Albert/a is very fine. Hope all's good with you.
I personally dislike naming nonhuman animals, but I do not believe animals are just "machines" or objects, and this does not stop me from growing fond of them.
Good luck to your attractive green larva
Hi CT - good to hear from you. Don't overdo the running! I have always felt that walking is a natural human activity and running an un-natural one, other than for bursts of speed to escape a predator - luckily not a common phenomenon, at least in my case. Sculling, my latest re-interest, is another matter. Although wobbly, I find the motion comes naturally. And you certainly exp[end minimum effort on going fast.
Brian is a good name too. It's hard to avoid the temptation to rear catties and watch the whole amazinbg life cycle, but I am worried about forgetting to pick food for them etc - I'm glad that you are increasing the national stock of lady's smock - milkmiads we call them
all warmest
M
Hi Alex - I agree that there can be problems over 'humanising' animals. I am glad that we have the Beatrix Potter tales as they are wonderful and imaginative stories. But they give children a rather sentimental view of Nature's tooth-and-claw goings on. All best M
Indeed, people who keep cecropias and other mega-silkmoths say that without outdoor protection nearly all of their caterpillars are parasitized by wasps or meet some other nasty fate. After all, insects are famous for often producing enormous egg batches to compensate.
Regarding the "butterfly" conversation on the swallowtail post:
My observations are similar to yours; small butterflies employ dizzying maneuvers and speed, while large ones fly more slowly. However, even the bigger ones are not pleasant to watch, as they fly too jerkily for my comfort and rarely land.
However, all of them are extremely wary, with a common orange-ish skipper being the least cautious and thus most pleasant (if you move very slowly you can catch the skipper with fingers, not that it's a good idea).
I'm not sure why they are so alert, because they seem to be ignored by most predators. I have also seen bright neon orange aposematic-looking beetles drop into the undergrowth when touched, which is strange. I have heard from multiple sources that arthropod predators will eagerly eat brightly colored prey that vertebrates reject.
Expect severe account hiccuping, as I need to deal with further security issues
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