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A Hawk Moth Saga by Florence Caldwell.
In mid-July of 1972 I found on the pavement outside the
house a large and beautiful moth, I picked it up to move it
to a safer position expecting it to fly away, however, It
stayed on my hand so peacefully I decided to take it indoors
and save for a few hours under a glass jar to show my son who
was working at a local school at the time and had been breeding
moths of various kinds for the biology classes.
Much to our consternation our moth friend promptly laid about
70 eggs, so having decided it was a hawk moth of some sort we
let her fly away. The eggs remained on the kitchen window
ledge - no one new what else to do with them and its that sort
of household anyway - for about a week, when someone noticed
that instead of just eggs we now had some small wriggly things
as well. Ignoring, the suggestion that we should feed them to
our tropical fish, I now had quite a problem as I felt very
responsible for these young creatures I had so inadvertantly
become a mother to - I hadn't any idea what to feed them on as
I didn't even know their true parentage. A search through all
the books and encyclopeadias in the house narrowed it down to
the Poplar and Lime Hawk Moths, although not having the original
moth to compare with the rather poor illustrations, identifica-
tion was by no means certain.
So we first gave our little caterpillars some poplar leaves -
which they ignored and them some lime tree leaves - quickly
devoured, so at least we knew how to carry on feeding.
Some very hectic six weeks followed, 65 caterpillars hatched
from the eggs and ate and ate and ate'. All the local lime trees
soon became denuded of leaves that were within reach and all
the family were instructed to, bring back .leaves from their
journeys from home every day. Fortunately, Havering has many
tree-lined roads and lime trees appear to be a favourite with
our Parks Department for this purpose.
I soon learned that the plastic box containing our caterpill-
ars needed frequent attention as condensation caused the
drowning of a few poor charges, others seemd to die for no
apparent reason and one I left the lid slightly ajar and had
to retrieve caterpillars from all over the kitchen, losing two
in the process but the bigger and stronger specimens grew into