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magnificent creatures.
The summer holidays in August posed another problem
as the family were all dispersing to different parts of
the British Isles at the same time. An obliging neigh-
bour was found to come in twice daily to feed the cat,
rabbit, tortoise and tropical fish but I lacked the
courage to ask her to feed 50 or more very hungry
caterpillars as well. The only solution was for. our
little family to go on a camping holiday in Norfolk.
By mid-September there remained 25 large handsone
creatures still eating ravenously all the leaves we
could supply. Then lethargy began to set in and one by
one they changed to chrysalises, the three smallest
dying before metamorphoaea was complete. The 22 remaining
I placed in a small box of damp earth and put under the
floorboards of the cupboard under the stairs along with
the tortoise in his special box until the spring.
A warm spell in late April made it possible to bring
out Henry the tortoise again and his winter companions
were transferred to a small aquarium of damp earth.
Six weeks passed without sign of life then one warm
morning in June there was a moth, newly emerged, hanging
from the twigs with wings pumped up and beautiful.
During the following three weeks others followed, the lid
of the aquarium was removed at night to enable them to
fly away without being snapped up by birds and un-
fortunately some mornings I forgot to replace this.
Therefore of the exact number of hawk moths we added to
our natural population we cannot be sure but 14 specimens
were definitely released. I felt I had done a reasonable
job of caring for my moth's progeny even if I'd upset
the local ecological balance a little.
We learned several things from our experiment (1) How
to identify a lime hawk and its caterpillar, (2) How
few lime trees grow in a certain part of Norfolk and how '
many are planted as roadside trees in Havering, (3) The
mortality rate when there were no predators was still
fairly high, especially at the early caterpillar stage,
(4) The moths we released were considerably smaller