Hitchhiker

 

Penny had a surprise yesterday. It wasn't until she was reaching 50mph on the way home that she noticed this small, brightly-coloured hitchhiker on the windscreen. It survived the journey including a stop at Tesco's where it made itself more comfortable by snuggling into the wiper, above.

I'm checking on Upper Thames Moths but I'm pretty sure that it's a young Lime Hawk moth cattie, a creature which undergoes quite spectacular changes in its appearance as it grows and sheds its skin, ending up with a vivid blue tail horn.  It seems to have settled in to a box of lime leaves, so we may keep it until it pupates.

With my love of blue, I was meanwhile very chuffed to get this focussed close-up of a Common Blue in our neighbouring field whose generously-wide unploughed margins I was praising only yesterday, when it was the turn of a Small Heath. The blue may be common but it uncommonly lovely.

The same goes for the butterflies and male Southern Hawker dragonfly below which are the fruits of my latest visit to the Trap Grounds nature reserve to photograph its wildlife. The Small White in particular appealed to me, with its left forewing torn and folded over by the batterings of life. It was still up for a prolonged series of courtship dances with a potential mate which kept disrupting my efforts to take its picture.

The moth trap meanwhile remains fairly quiet apart from occasional highlights such as the visit earlier this week from the Clifden Nonpareil. Here are a couple of composites: a 1,2,3 of Light Emeralds, the trio seen through the trap's much-used 'transparent' cowl, and a quintet: two Centre-barred Sallows,  a Willow Beauty, an immigrant White-point, a species enjoying an excellent year, and one of the regular, tiny Small Dusty Waves which seem to like living in our house.