Sometimes, you just marvel at nature’s creation and the caterpillar of the vapourer moth never fails to impress me! A mass of hair and ‘shaving brushes’ and difficulty in determining which is the head and which is the tail, this is a very impressive beast. I have photographed these caterpillars a few times now, but I have never photographed the adult insect. Only the male vapourer moth flies, the females are a small, fat, wingless creature that the males seek out using pheromones.
I’ve been running my newly aquired moth trap over the past couple of weeks and I’m catching a few different species, mostly common, small plain moths. This morning, however, I had a great suprise when I opend the trap to find this perfect poplar hawk moth sitting quetly in the corner of the trap. I’ve seen these in the garden before and photographed them too, but not for a long time. I bobbed him on a hosta that I’ve just bought for the garden and took his picture :¬)
Today’s shoot was all about the Emperor Moth, a really special inhabitant of the moorland habitat. Although they occur widely in Yorkshire, we decided to do our emperor moth on the North York Moors as we’d seen a likely spot while out looking for ring ouzels a couple of days ago. We easily found a couple of specimens that were almost pristine and here are the resulting images. No-one could be failed to be impressed by this colourful and spectacular moth!
Today we hit the North York Moors to do a bit of moorland birding in search of ring ouzel. Ring ouzel is a bird I’ve wanted to photograph for years but I’ve never put the effort in and, as it’s now in long term decline, I thought I’d better do something about it. We had several sightings and I managed a few record shots though nothing worth showing. However, I think we have located a couple of areas where they are likely to nest this year and so in a couple of weeks time we will go back and try and do them as they feed the young. In the meantime, here are a few other images from the day
After an unsuccessful trip to see the North Yorkshire eagle owl, we headed over to the coast and spent a couple of hours on a bright, breezy beach photographing Sanderling at South Gare. The beach is quite pleasant though the old industrial back drop is a bit more insulubrious. There were one or two species of waders on the beach but just where the snady area meets the rocky foreshore, there was a small huddle of sanderling roosting on the high tide. They were a bit skittish and didn’t allow too close an approach, but we were able to get close enough to create a few portraits of them on the rocks. Many were really coming into full summer plumage and were really quite different from the slivery white colour of winter.
