I spotted this little chap in the greenhouse today and decided that he’d make a good subject…..actually, I don’t know why I’m calling it a ‘he’ – I have no idea how to sex a butterfly/moth, let alone a caterpillar.

Now I’m sure someone will tell me they’re hermaphrodites or something but anyway, there you go.

Anyway, I was happily snapping away when I took a series of shots that clearly show it defecating. I had never even thought about butterflies/moths defecating until I saw Emma Assander’s shot of a butterfly weeing the other day and so to then capture this myself seems like a really strange coincidence.

So, despite the somewhat dubious ‘taste’ of it – I have loaded a sequence of shots of this event into a mini gallery and do feel they are well worth a ‘butchers’, especially viewed on slideshow! In the light of my continual moaning about crap shots, I think this one fits the bill nicely!

I tried to look up what type of moth or butterfly it was but couldn’t identify it in any serious way from the shots I saw of caterpillars online. The closest thing I saw to it was a vapourer moth but that didn’t look exactly the same so it’s just a guess really.

Then I discovered a Cornwall Moth Group so I have learned something new today, even though the new knowledge isn’t exactly what I might have expected.

I’m not sure whether to laugh with joy at the thought that we’ve got such a wonderful array of these little critters in our garden or weep – you should see what the little sods have done to my broccoli – it looks like a skeleton!

Shortly after this, I made a somewhat worrying discovery – a bloody big hole, underneath a pile of rubbish in the garden that I was trying to clear by hauling it out to go to the dump.

What can it be? A mineshaft? An adit? A badger or fox hole? A well? We have no idea and to be frank we’re a little intimidated by it! Ah well, if one of us wants to murder the other at any stage, it’ll make a good hiding place for the body – we could enact a Robert what’s-is-face book!!!!


Very, very shallow depth of field was my technique last year.