Beware of the Elephants

Some good friends set me the challenge above which is handy at this time of the year when caterpillars are wandering around looking for somewhere to chrysalise. I knew the answer because my acquaintanceship with this appealing creature goes back to my early teens when the head of natural history at Leeds Museum, a lovely man called John Armitage, encouraged me and my brother to go and search for them at the end of the Summer holidays.

It's an Elephant Hawk moth cattie and its colour is the sign that it is ready to tuck itself away in a cocoon. The caterpillars are green for almost all their lives, turning olivey-brown and then grey only at the very end. 

This is when they look like elephants' trunks - well, if you half-shut your eyes and open your imagination - and accounts for the name of the moth which often puzzles people. The adult insect is a beautiful pink and lime green and bears no resemblance to an elephant except for those mythical pink ones.

Elephants are loved by all and feature in some of our best children's stories including The Elephant and the Bad Baby which was written by an excellent woman, Elfrida Vipont, who was a prominent Quaker and wrote completely different books about the Quaker way of life. Mind you, The Elephant and the Bad Baby has a very gentle moral point, sugared by the fact that the Bad Baby is a most appealing character.

One of its fans was my granddaughter, now a great entomologist, who sent me the picture below of a Brimstone Moth at Birmingham airport railway station, with a quiz for Granny and myself about what the full sign said. (Granny won with 'Customer Services'). The granddaughter got into quite a conversation with the station staff who said that a lot of Brimstone moths came to their lights and reflective signs at night. So there's a curious piece of species data.

Another young friend, whose topknot can just be seen at the bottom of the next picture, kindly sent me this spot from the canal. She knows that we have had narrowboats pass through with the names of every single member of our family, remote cousins included. And now we have a moth. 

The trap is fairly routine at the moment, but that is not to denigrate the arrivals, including bright little micros such as this Pyrausta purpuralis, a slightly less common relative of the familiar Mint Moth, Pyrausta aurata, which often flickers around near our herbs.

There's also a good number of moths every night and overcrowding in the cones is commonplace - here we have an Angle Shades with its umbrella-style wing-folding visible on the left, a Large Yellow Underwing lurking at the back, a Rosy Rustic and a little ermine micro at the front.

Next we have that fine creature, a Common Marbled Carpet, really quite a size bigger than most otrher carpet moths, and finally a Gothic, very well-named with its patterning so like the spars of an ancient church window.