Thursday, August 03, 2006

Another visitor

I found the 4- spotted footman I photographed the other day inside our floor lamp, fried to a crisp, poor little thing. Unfortunately, there isn't any way of preventing moths and files getting in to the halogen bulb within if they are really determined.

As well as hundreds of tiny flies and mosquitoes ,I also found a singed green shield bug -so I've decided to put other interesting visitors back outside the window, after taking their photo, that is.

This was another interesting visitor attracted by the halogen light, after much searching around I think its either a Flounced Chestnut moth Agrochola helvola or a Beaded Chestnut moth Agrochola lychnidis.
B
oth of these species can be variable in colour so its difficult to work out which one is which when looking at thumbnails on the web.

Hopefully the book I've ordered will help me identify moths better when it arrives and tell me a bit more about their habits.

Both the flounced chestnut and beaded chestnut prefer woodland so its interesting that it was found in the centre of Nice.



A LargeWhite butterfly aka Cabbage White - Pieris brassica

These butterflies are pretty common in Britain but I don't see so many here in France for some reason.
I thought i would try and photograph some of the 'more ordinary' butterflies when i saw them.

The Large White is a pest- at least for gardeners- as the caterpillars do a lot of damage to vegetables such as cabbages.
The adults is stuill quite graceful and beautiful though.



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2 comments:

natural attrill said...

The shades of brown are nice, would be great to have a jumper knitted like the wings! Talking of wings I just love the dragonfly wings on your last photos, beautiful.
Penny.

Anonymous said...

The cabbage moth butterflies are really prolific here - and come caterpillar time they devastate my herb and vegetable garden. Always leaves a tough decision, save the plants and destroy the caterpillars or leave the plants to the caterpillars and enjoy the butterflies - I've taken to the latter approach ;-)