Italian excursion

 

The day after my last post, we headed off to Italy and a wonderful week in Bologna, Ravenna and Ferrara. I wasn't especially in search of moths but I kept an eye out and soon realised that a familiar species was wreaking as much havoc on Italian gardens as it is in the UK on box hedges in gardens such as those of the National Trust.  A few minutes after seeing the devastated lines of box at the Palazzo Costabili in Ferrara, I spotted a black and white flutter and tracked an adult Box moth to its refuge in a large bush - shown below.

                                               

You can see from this aerial Google view below how much the Palazzo has to lose, although there are nicer and more interesting hedges than box in my view. I showed my picture to the staff at the museum's reception and they nodded gloomily. They knew all about the moth but like their counterparts in the UK where the moth arrived accidentally from south east Asia in 2007 and has since made itself thoroughly at home, there is little that they could do. Rooting out and replanting with a different hedging plant is the likely option.

My only new moth during the week was this cream and brown, jittery character in the next picture which was dodging about between scrubby flowers in the car park at Commachio, a minute version of Venice where the restaurants specialise in eels. It's a Geometrician, a species only twice recorded in the UK, in 1903 and 1990, a curious combination for me as the first was 47 years before I was born and the second in the year during which I turned 40. It gets its name from its 'looper' caterpillar which has no middle legs and thus appears to be measuring its journey as it repeatedly advances with its forelegs and then hoicks its hindlegs after them.

I also spotted this below, which had the look of a Grizzled Skipper but was too nervous to give anything more than this blurred photo. I've had a look at my European butterflies Bible and initially wondered if it might be some sort of Grizzled Skipper; but I think that it is more likely to be an Italian version of the day-flying Latticed Heath moth.

   

That spot was in the countryside near Pieve di Cento where I also found these pretty Common Blues, a Common Darter dragonfly and a scarecrow which warded none of the above or their larvae off

Finally, away from the insects, here's a Wall Lizard appropriately on the ancient walls of Ferrara, a hungry slug in Ravenna and a Blue Crab with only one big claw at Commachio, an invasive species which can lay eight million eggs in one brood. Eeek!