Since I returned in late August from a month in France, other commitments have taken up more time than I planned. One of the consequences is that although most of the moth photographs from August onwards had been labelled, there were a few more difficult ones that hadn't; nor had I looked again at some of the provisional identifications, and none of my records had been transferred from the notebook into my database. Hence I've been spending quieter moments in the Christmas period going through the last five months of records (including most of the French records that I hadn't checked). There have been a few interesting memory-joggers in there, and a few puzzles.
The only puzzle whose solution still eludes me is a caterpillar found on the outside of the moth-trap on the night of 28th-29th August which was the first time I ran it after getting back from France. There appears to be nothing in the Henwood/Sterling/Lewington guide that matches the dark dorsal stripe, the yellowish edging and the green overall colour, with the long black hairs and the somewhat shorter whitish hairs. Perhaps it's not a final instar.
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| Newton Longville 28th August 2021 |
Can anyone identify it? The overall length was slightly below 20 mm.
With this single exception, I am now up to date for 2021, but I will delay running my yearly analysis: the weather forecast for the end of this week looks promising, so I will probably run the traps on Thursday night (and/or Friday) and hope to augment the figures ever so slightly.
Tim Arnold
Newton Longville, Bucks
Hi Tim, I think it's a Buff Ermine.
ReplyDeleteHello Tim. I think Nigel is right. I raised some Buff Ermines this year and your's looks very similar to the intermediate stages of the caterpillars. I think I can't put images in the comments section, so I'll post them separately.
ReplyDeleteAndy King.
Yes, Buff Ermine for me too. For larvae it is always worth having a look at the late Reg Fry's website 'UK Leps' (www.ukleps.org) which is amongst the links on the right hand column on this page. The site can be a bit tedious to search through but it is a fantastic resource for caterpillar identification because, for most macros at least, there are images of early and mid-instar larvae too. It can often be much more helpful than the book by Henwood et al which only illustrates final instars.
ReplyDeleteMany thanks to Nigel, Andy and Dave. I had made a close look at many of the Erebidae in the book as they seemed to have the right kind of hairs, but the body colours didn't match, which is why I wondered if it was an earlier instar. Unfortunately, I didn't have the reflex to look at the UK Leps site.
ReplyDeleteUnlike Andy, I haven't reared any Buff Ermine, although a female left me some on an egg tray earlier in the year.