I'm a selfish person. I must be, as I like it when we arrive to find the car park at Littleferry empty so we have the reserve to ourselves. As it turned out, the place became quite busy, with half-a-dozen dog-walkers and one unusual couple, like us, without a dog.
It was a beautiful morning, plenty of sunshine but with a brisk southwesterly. We started from Loch Fleet, where the tide was coming in fast, and then progressed northwards along the beach in the direction of Golspie. As seems normal these days at Loch Fleet, there was precious little to see: two oystercatchers, four cormorants, what might have been the first sandwich tern of the season, two crows, two skeins totalling perhaps a hundred geese heading north, a few skylarks singing joyous songs for us and, to my considerable surprise, a butterfly being blown in across the beach, presumable having flown across from the loch's south shore.
We made our way back along the edge of the forestry where, in the more protected sunny spots, we saw a bumblebee and some flies, and then....
....the year's first caterpillar, a rather beautiful one which, despite some effort, I have failed to identify..
That's the Drinker Moth caterpillar. Overwintered as a young larva and now fattening up for flight in June. It's often seen covered in dew drops on a misty morning. Yours seems to be missing the rows of lovely golden speckles along each side like gold dust- maybe its just the angle of the photograph, showing more underside. Usually easy to identify; grey background, dark tufts along the top, white tufts along each side and a dark spike at each end. The colours can be variable though. Look out for the Fox Moth caterpillar of a similar size which is also fattening up in April.
ReplyDeleteThanks for identifying the caterpillar. It's not a flattering photo - the sides had some beautiful gold bits. Jon
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