A gorgeous Painted Lady butterfly chose Sunday to make an appearance in the garden – in the nick of time to get rec on the last day of the Big Butterfly Count – perfect timing! Like the hummingbird hawkmoths, these beautiful butterflies are also summer migrants from North Africa and in some years they arrive in their thousands. They only live for a few weeks so it’s amazing that they can emerge in Africa, fly over to the UK and still have time to spend a few days gorging themselves on the nectar in our garden!
Possessing slightly less obvious beauty is this Old Lady moth, which coincidentally I was trying to photograph just as the Painted Lady came flaunting herself around the garden on Sunday morning. About the same size as the Painted Lady, the Old Lady is much more sombrely coloured and clearly less agile, as she flew off with a laboured flapping, as if she was really too heavy to fly. I say “she”, but of course this particular Old Lady could have been a “he” – I didn’t examine it that closely!
Can’t think why but I felt closer to the slightly batty old lady than I did to the bright young thing!
A miserable rainy night yesterday. Not ideal for the moth trap or for traipsing round the garden in your dressing gown at 4am to rescue soggy egg boxes full of moths. But it was all worth it when this Leopard Moth showed its spots in the trap. They’re supposedly reasonably common, but this is the first one I’ve seen in the garden. My lovely little leopard brings the number of moth species seen in our garden this year up to a total of 107! Not bad considering we’re only just over half way through the year. You’d never know most of these moths were around (unless you go camping and have to use an outside loo at night with the light on) as they disappear to who knows where during the day.
Too Lazy To Weed 