This little lovely is a lime hawk moth on the pavement just down the street yesterday. Our instinct was to take it to a safer place - a shrub outside the house.
But the life of the lime hawk moth doesn't quite fit the fairy tale. As an adult it doesn't feed - it mates and dies; perhaps ours was already on the way out.
Near the shrub there is bucket with water for pot plants. One of the local boys wanted some water for his water pistol and we had a look in the bucket and found that it was teeming with animal life: mosquito larvae, tiny red worms, water fleas (I'm pretty sure) and even smaller creatures going about their business. It's enough to make you believe in spontaneous generation.
Well, mosquitoes could have laid eggs, and anyhow the water came from a water butt, not from the tap. But a few years ago the water butt was a clean, empty plastic container and the rain came from the sky. Evidently the makings of water life are constantly lurking in relatively dry places.
In sum, Nature goes on in her mysterious and heartless way in Camberwell.
2 comments:
fascinating blog wayfarer! Thanks.
I have questions regarding compost I hope you could help me answer - here in Edinburgh I find myself attacked by a cloud of small flies - reddish in colous - whenever i open my compost bucket. Is this a seasonal issue? Will they go away? Can I add things to my compost (say citrus peels) to keep them at bay?
Eric
P.S. What of the water pistol boy? I assume he chose not to fill the pistol with the bio-weaponry found in the bucket...
Small flies have there place in Nature too; but I agree it is not pleasant to have a crowd of them around one's face when one opens the lid of the compost bin. My impression is that there are phases in the fauna of compost bins - a lot of worms fairly early on, big yellow slugs later (yummy) and at a late stage a lot of woodlice (slaters to you Edinbourgeois) and centipedes (which maybe eat woodlice). Small flies are just another of the stages. We sometimes get them, sometimes not. I have an idea, not based on very much, that they may be fruit flies, so they come if the compost bin is fruit rich. If that is the case, citrus peels might make the situation worse (but go on composting those citrus peels anyway). So the answer? patience and tolerance.
ps having become fascinated by the tiny creatures he forgot about the water pistol project.
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