Montague the moth…

Well he made it.

Remember back to last September when I told you about Monty, the elephant hawk moth? I rescued from a hungry thrush.

No? Well, you can see him as the huge caterpillar that he was and read all about it here if you like:

http://akh-wonderfullife.blogspot.com/2010/09/monty-moth-to-be.html

I don't regret a single day, and I'm not at all sure that (even without getting eaten by thrushes or hedgehogs) Monty would have survived that terrible winter we had.

Anyway, for the last nine months or so Monty has been safely cocooned in the lovely lemonade bottle vivarium that I lovingly made for him, waiting to begin the rest of his mothy life. It’s been a long wait, and over the last few weeks (unsure exactly when Monty would emerge) he’s been travelling to and from Wales with us at weekends in the boot of the car ‘just in case’.

Well, at long last it has happened. Yesterday Monty the leathery brown chrysalis turned into Montague the beautiful pinky-green moth.

I only just caught him as he emerged, there was no warning. One moment Monty was quietly hibernating inside his bottle on the kitchen work-surface whilst I moribundly tapped away on my keyboard, the next (with a slight rustle to catch my attention) he emerged in all his glory. I just managed to catch him laboriously pull the last of his thorax from his pupa, that’s him in his ‘coming out’ photo above.

Even though I knew that it would happen one day I still can’t quite believe that this fluttery, iridescent creature is my Monty. My Monty is the leathery, grubby, thing that now lies empty and immobile at the bottom of the bottle, not this magnificent furry wonder. It’s almost like someone has died – how strange.

So that’s that. Job done, moth reared. All I have to do now is set him free into the wide world and hope that a bat doesn’t eat him. I think I’m going to miss him.