Bursting out of its skin

 

Even after all these years, my adventures in the moth world bring me new experiences and I've just had another one, courtesy of my eagle-eyed granddaughter. We were walking along the canal when she spotted the very small but exciting caterpillar shown above, immobile on the stem of a plant in a tub which was almost dead from lack of water in the current drought.

It was so inert that I thought, after a while, that it might be the shedded skin of a caterpillar, burst open in the wholesale moult which affects these little creatures at regular intervals. They munch and munch and grow and grow until they literally burst out of their skin. This is left behind and the shiny 'new' caterpillar gets busy with the munching straight away; bursting again at regular intervals until it emerges from one such change as a chrysalis.

Well, I wasn't so far wrong. The caterpillar was alive and well and not a skin. But it was getting ready for the change. We popped it in a box and the next morning, this is what we saw, above. The newly-shed old skin on the left and the bouncy new caterpillar on the right.  Full of energy, it set off to explore a vine leaf, below, before I decanted it into one of our walnut trees.

I chose the walnut because the caterpillar is that of the Vapourer moth and the only previous time that I've seen one was on a branch of the walnut when I was making repairs to the roof of the children's tree house. It's best to keep your distance from those fierce-looking hairs and spines. They can cause a rash if your skin is susceptible to such things.

Meanwhile the moths keep coming whan I light the mercury vapour bulb in my trap. Recent arrivals include the Latticed Heath below, butterfly-like in its resting position:

Then I had a couple of Rakish Angle Shades moths:

A Tawny Speckled Pug:

A Chinese Character with its curiously distinctive resting pose like a small pill:

And the very attractive micro Anania coronata which calls by occasionally to give me the time of day: