Night night Atropos...

The sad news today is that Atropos, our resident Death's Head Hawk-Moth has passed away to the great beehives in the sky.

Tomorrow would have been his 13th week as an adult, a very good innings I think, and he may be the oldest known to science ( unless you know different?).

It has been a great pleasure to watch him over the last months, feeding and flying around, and it may be something that I never see again. Atropos, in case you have been held hostage or on the moon since autumn, was reared from a wild caterpillar found creeping along a track in Northants back in September.

If you would like to see him again, just search the labels on the right or scroll through the posts since 17th Sept last year.

As Atropos has starred on small screen, I think some acknowledgements are appropriate.We would like to thank Victoria for finding him in the first place and to his fan club from all over the UK for following his progress, without whom none of this would have been possible. (sniff).

Thank you and goodnight. (sob)

 

Atropos

Atropos will be 9 weeks old on Friday. This equals the oldest I can find on the internet, and that one was in captivity by a breeder who sells the eggs to the public to breed through. The photo above is a phone shot in artificial light but its shows our man feeding on a honeycomb solution. This he gets every other day. You can see that he no longer has the striped stockings and neat white tips to the antennae, but most obvious are his squared off wing tips.  I wonder how long he will continue? He is being added to Christmas card greetings now!