Thanks
Neil. I know all too well how you switch off in safer conditions. I’m not good with heights so I’m always very careful climbing up a ladder at work but the number off times I’ve tripped up a step… well
Thanks
Wurzel, Owls do have surprisingly long legs!
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November 2021
Friday the 5th. Another return to Bookham to check on the 5th instar White Admiral caterpillar. There’d be several rather chilly nights with grounds frosts since my last visit so I was even less hopeful than last time of finding it but somehow it was still alive. It had clearly made itself at home with lots of silk on it’s chosen leaf as well as some nibbling along the edge although had this been late May, I would imagine most of the leaves here would have been consumed by now.
![IMG_0014.JPG (133.15 KiB) Viewed 405 times IMG_0014.JPG](./files/thumb_13753_fe947f9e880e267fddf506dfbb112182)
Elsewhere the other two I’ve been keeping an eye on were just fine. Finding these little brown spikey creatures during hibernation is a little bit trickier than earlier in the year, not least because predation has caused numbers to dwindle but once you know what you’re looking for, but far from impossible. The easiest ones are of course the ones you’ve found before hibernation who haven’t wandered far from where you last saw them. This image shows the location of one of the two I’ve been able to follow since before hibernation. One of its final feeding leaves is still very obvious with its central extended ‘pier’in the lower right, the hibenaculum is the small 'pouch' on the upper left.
It's this pier that’s my main way of re-locating ‘lost’ caterpillars as Autumn draws into winter. Here’s another one who’s owner is still on the ‘lost/MIA list but again shows how obvious it is.
Another technique I’ve stumbled across is the use of flash. Invariably I have to use flash to photograph these caterpillars since they live in the darkest, dankest recesses of the wood and my camera, or perhaps my camera skills
![Embarassed :oops:](./images/smilies/icon_redface.gif)
, just aren’t up to such low light without the aid of artificial light. The flash does make the caterpillars ‘pop out’ in the resulting images, even just a few spines become much easier to see against the dark background. Here’s a re-found one. I couldn’t see him with the naked eye but the remains of the pier at the bottom of the pictures showed one had been here at some point. A closer look with the aid of the flash showed a few reddish spines poking out from his hibernaculum. The angle and arrangement of the leaves meant I couldn’t see it from other angles without manipulating the leaves or hibernaculum, both of which could easily end in disaster for the caterpillar, so without using flash this one would almost certainly have gone unnoticed.
A context shot showing the location of the same hibernaculum
My search for
iris finally gave me some hope that I’m on the right track. Using Benjamin’s technique of looking for danglers (old feeding leaves still attached by silk) came up trumps (I think) the dead leaf on the far right here was gently swaying in the light breeze and there’s some feeding damage on the left. I did search but the minor detail of leaving my glasses at home didn’t help, plus this particular Sallow has quite a bit of bramble growing through it making any comprehensive search virtually impossible without risking killing any caterpillar lurking… the search continues.
The local Redwings proved elusive today but before leaving I was able to watch a pair of Crows harassing a Buzzard. I think it was a youngster since they spent a fair old time mobbing it and much higher up a pair circled which I took to be the parents. When it finally got rid of them it glided back quite low giving me some impressive views
Tuesday the 9th. I returned four days later to find the White Admiral caterpillar had finally fallen victim to something, I’m not sure whether it was partially predated or whether it had finally succumbed to the cold and it had been scavenged but it still survived far longer than I thought it would when I first discovered it.
I did manage to locate another ‘lost’ one using the methods outlined above. In this case the caterpillar can just be made out to the left of the old feeding leaf where it seems to have simply sewn a couple of dead leaves together to create a hibernaculum. Again, despite it looking quite obvious in the pictures, I couldn’t see this one with the naked eye.
Having remembered to bring my glasses this time I had another look around the dangler Sallow leaf but alas nothing was found. Earlier in the day, at another Sallow thicket that I’ve scanned numerous times I watched a gang of Long-tailed Tits work the stems wondering how many iris they were finding, certainly many more than I was!
Birdwise, I found my first Fieldfare of the winter but with the low sun in front of me the resulting pictures are rather shoddy record shots at best