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.
