Tuesday 29 September 2009

Scarce Swallowtail Butterfly






So far my blog posts have chronicled my pictures of insects pretty much in the chronological order they were taken, but I thought I'd post up this recent picture - a rare treat I saw while on holiday in the south of France this summer. Pictures like this really exemplify the advantages of digital photography. I noticed this beautiuful Scarce Swallowtail feeding on some plants by the beach, and it afforded some great opportunities to take lots of photographs. With traditional film I might have taken perhaps 3 pictures at most, because of the need to save pictures for other things on holiday, but with digital I could snap away and then select the best shots later. In fact I think I took about 20, but only three were really good enough. Partly this is because I was using a zoom lens on macro facility, hand held, so getting the focus sharp is extremely difficult. I've sharpened the pictures up slightly using Picasa.






The Scarce Swallowtail is not, I have read, actually as rare as the Swallowtail, which it resembles. I have a photograph of the latter, which I'll post up at a later date. While they are both very beautiful butterflies, I think the the Scarce Swallowtail has the edge in terms of attractiveness.






I don't know what the attractive plant is that the butterfly is on. Any ideas?








Thursday 20 August 2009

Graphosoma Italicum Shieldbug





I'm always coming across a new insect which gets into my list of favourites, and in 2008 this brilliantly coloured little shield bug, the graphosoma italicum did just that, for no other reason that its colouring is so fantastic! They are not very big, perhaps 1cm from head to tail, and are fairly common, but not in the UK by all accounts. The ones I have seen have all been in France. The redder of the specimens here is in Brittany, while the pair (presumably mating), which are noticeably more orange in colour, are right on the south coast. The are both on the same plant as far as I can tell, so I'm wondering why the variation in colour - perhaps some kind of sub-species variation?

Really big flies!




If you live in the North Pennines or Highland Scotland you might be familiar with this pretty monstrous fly! Then again, you may have mistaken it for a bumble bee, as its size, shape and colour all make it look as much like a bumble bee as a fly. As far as I am aware it doesn't have a common name, but my studies have revealed it to be the Tachina Grossa. I first saw specimens on top of Padon Hill in Northumberland in 1991, where they were cruising about rather loudly and menacingly - as far as I know they are totally harmless to humans, but that said I wouldn't fancy having one land on me! Then I saw some again in a little placed called Laide, in Wester Ross, Scotland, in 1996. I managed to take this picture, which isn't one of my best but I'm including it as it is an interesting specimen. Notice how its creamy yellow head is in striking contrast to the rest of its black hairy body.



This is one for me to try to get a better digital picture of. The picture here was taken on a Minolta Dynax 500i using Fujichrome 100 film.

Emperor moth


During the early 1980s it was not uncommon to find the large and brightly coloured caterpillar of the Emperor moth on moorland in South Yorkshire. It is a bright green with thin yellow or pink rings which have small tufts of dark hairs. I would find them during excursions to pick bilberries on the moors near Stocksbridge. (Such visits would always subsequently turn into caterpillar hunting outings!) After one particularly prolific visit I came home with about five really nice big caterpillars - not a very ecologically friendly thing to do but I was only about 14 at the time. I put them in a box with plenty of the plant on which we had found them - probably bilberries I think. It was probably only a couple of weeks before I noticed a couple of rather curious brown hairy cocoons - not a regular chrysalis at all. I think they all pupated successfully like this, but the next spring only one moth hatched out - however it was a beautiful specimen, as this picture shows. I had seen a picture of an Emperor Moth before, but the real thing is much more vivid. Look at the stripes on the body, and the red tips on the wings. I'm not sure whether this is a male or a female.

Once it hatched out we were keen for it to thrive (probably a somewhat forlorn hope in the centre of an industrial town) and set about trying to get it to feed, without success. Some time later we discovered in a book that the adult moth does not feed at all and doesn't even have a mouth! This was one of my first glimpses of the rather weird world of insects. Our conventional notion of an "adult" does not apply in the case of the Emperor Moth, or many other species in fact, where the vast majority of the insect's life is spent as a juvenile, eating. The adult is simply the form in which reproduction can take place.

Anyway, despite still visiting the same places over the years, I now no longer see the emperor moth caterpillars - does anyone else out there have recent sightings? I have never seen one of the moths since this one - and this one was in 1983! A question - what causes the different colouration of the rings on the caterpillars? Why do some have orangey yellow rings and others have pink? Is it age, sex or something else?

The photograph was taken with a Pentax MV camera, using Fujichrome 100 film.

Wednesday 19 August 2009

My first successfully hatched moth


Back in 1980 I found an elephant hawkmoth caterpillar - I think it was while we were out picking blackberries near Cawthorne (a pretty village near home), so it was probably September time. I brought it home and put it in a cardboard box with some fine gauze fastened over the top, and kept it regularly stocked with rosebay willow herb leaves (a favourite food plant, and on which we had seen the caterpillars before). Anyway, after a while the caterpillar disappeared (and I also lost a bit of interest) and I half thought it had escaped to perish somewhere in the dark recesses of our cellar, or had died in the box and was under a pile of leaves. Months later, in the spring of 1981, I happened upon the box, still with the gauze on the top. The leaves had all shrivelled up at the bottom of the box, but there was a large shape on the side. I carefully removed the gauze, and there in all its splendour was a beautiful elephant hawkmoth! I actually didn't know what the moth would look like, as I had never seen a picture of one, so I was astounded at its bright pink and green colours. The picture here is the actual moth, and is from a 35mm transparency, taken with a Zenith EM camera.
I have only ever seen one other live specimen, which was in summer 1991 when there was one in the dining hut at Hesley Wood Scout Camp. The last time I saw one of the caterpillars was in summer 1993 when there was a veritable herd of them grazing on rosebay willow herbs on a country lane near Danby Wiske in North Yorkshire. I wish I'd taken a photo of them!
I'd be interested in anyone else's sightings of the enigmatic elephant hawkmoth and/or its caterpillar - I always scan patches of rosebay willow herb for the caterpillars but the fact that I have not seen any for more than a decade would seem to suggest its abundance has declined.

Welcome to my insect blog

I've always been interested in insects - at least as long as I can remember, and I just thought sharing my sightings, pictures and thoughts online might be a good way to keep this interest alive and also to connect with others who share the interest.

Once I've uploaded my archive content I intend to make blog entries only when I have something useful or interesting to report. So it might be a bit quiet during winter.

I should point out that I am nothing more than an enthusiastic amateur - I have no zoological training, and my specific insect interests will probably seem quite arbitrary and fickle, but hobbies don't have to have rules! I'll use latinised names where necessary, and welcome corrections where I have made an incorrect identification. Although I live in the UK my insect watching always extends to holidays too, so expect some "foreign" stuff - often more interesting, and usually bigger! (The hallmark of a good holiday is always the sighting of a new insect!)