Sticky socks

 

My official business here is moths but it's hard to resist the charms of butterflies at the moment. They are everywhere. So are the tenacious burrs of Goose Grass or Sticky Willie. Luckily I enjoy picking them out of my socks before falling asleep during the ten o-clock TV news. We have 25 species of butterfly on our two square mile patch - here's a cribsheet for locals which I made a year or two before the pandemic. Because it was Midsummer, I forgot the earlier-flying Orange-tip and we've since found Large Skippers and of course the Black Hairstreak described a couple of posts back.

My other butterfly adventure at the moment has been the breeding of a bundle of Peacock butterfly caterpillars which I found conveniently on a bed of nettles in our garden. The little caterpillars subsequently cleared much of the rest of the garden's wild fringe by munching through incredible amounts of nettle. I hardly dared go away because of the perils of missing their daily supply of leaves.

As per The Very Hungry Caterpillar, they soon became plump and the nettle consumption rate rocketed; I was even having to raid neighbours' gardens.

Wonderfully spikey, aren't they? And so are the chrysalises into which they metamorphosed after a month or so. The first to make this remarkable change tastefully chose the brightly coloured Sellotape which binds a muslin square to roof of my converted plastic storage box - my older son, whose daughter is as moth-minded as her Grandpa, calls it the 'mothodrome'.

I love the way that the caterpillars secure themselves and then dangle with their heads and upper bodies hooked up like question marks. This batch is now with the granddaughter while more are pupating here, ready for an invasion of great-nieces and nephews next weekend. I hope that everyone gets to see a final hatching into a butterfly, a magical experience which is widely available these days thanks to butterfly houses, and of course on the Internet and TV.

My daughter-in-law isn't keen on insects although the granddaughter is doing a brilliant, quiet job of winning her over. But I can't resist adding this picture of their clothes pegs, which seem to have taken the Peacock chrysalises as their model.