Spotted, August 2021
SPOTTED!
Wildlife in (and around) Hailsham
by Tim Fox
Some months back, I wrote about a buddleja in our garden that was not only self-service nutrition for bees and butterflies via nectar, but also to aphids via sap. This year, eagle-eyed Ann spotted something else helping itself to a cutting of the plant. The first clue that some-thing was feasting were the holes in the leaves. Suspecting slugs or snails (there have been quite a few after the wet month of June) the culprit was, much to my surprise, a caterpillar. Brightly coloured white, yellow and black and with a funky face mask, four caterpillars of cucullia verbasci (better known as the mullein moth) were merrily munching away, oblivious to what fate lay ahead of them. One option was to change their dimensions by making them much wider and significantly less tall, but this option wasn’t favoured by 100% of the household, so plan B was enacted: transfer them to the larger buddleja where their feasting would cause less damage. Over the course of the next two weeks, I played spot the caterpillars, which were usually located by their barrel-shaped poop. Eventually, having grown to well over an inch in length, the caterpillars disappeared one-by-one. I’d like to think they went to find a safe place to pupate, but I’m not ruling out one or two of them having been turned into snacks for the second brood of hungry blackbird chicks in our clematis. The adult blackbirds have been quite adept at catching moths as well, so those caterpillars that do successfully pupate into the moth best find a very safe place to hide up during the day.
Big Butterfly count is now well underway and runs until August 8th. Mullein moth is not one of the three species of moth to watch out for but, along with seventeen species of butterfly, keep an eye open for moths species Silver Y (mottled brown moth with small letter “y” on its wings), Six-Spot Burnet (black with red spots on its wings) and the drop-dead gorgeous Jersey Tiger (black wings with white stripes and red/orange hindwings). More details at butterfly-conservation.org
Photo credits: Tim Fox
Tim can be found most Saturday mornings gracing the airwaves with Pat Bradley on 95.9 Hailsham FM, discussing local happenings between 8 and 10am.