In the beginning was the the word. And the word was Deilephila elpenor

Ok, so it is actually two words. Why are they so important to me? This is why.



This is what started my interest in moths. I found the picture amongst the slides I had scanned recently. It is the very first time I had any desire to find out "what is that caterpillar?". Like all children we used to find caterpillars on the vegetables in the garden - yellow and black stripey ones were common as I recall - but that was it. They were caterpillars. This was a monster. I asked a few bird people and they referred me to Colin Plant, the moth recorder for VC 20, Herts. He stimulated my interest further and I bought a Heath trap.

He explained this was the Elephant Hawkmoth and that its larval foodplant was usually rosebay willowherb (Epilobium angustifolium). So I had discovered another new term - larval foodplant or LFP. And a caterpillar is a larva! I also discovered that the moth itself is called an imago, i.e. the adult form of the insect. Wow. This was better than the biology lessons we used to endure. Those consisted of looking at bulls eyes or cutting up frogs into little bits. I dropped biology like a stone as soon as I had the chance to choose my O'levels and ended up doing French, German, Latin & later Russian with barely a science to be seen. I was only marginally more interested in biology than I was in woodwork, at which I was, not to put too fine a point on it, crap. This shamed my father, who was a qualified engineer and could do everything from build our first TV to make his own HiFi from the bits supplied by a firm called Heathkit (I think), to service the car (a rather aged Wolsey 1500, "504 ATX" she was called, to build or repair just about everything around the house. Ah, but he couldn't conjugate Latin verbs and he didn't know which 9 prepositions in German only ever take the accusative case (FUDGEBOW). Which of us do you think has got more use out of our skills over the years?

So that was it. The heffalump hawkmoth started me "into" moths. About 10 years ago now. Wonderful things. Next year when Roger Kendrick runs HK's National Moth Night I highly recommend you go along and see just what might be lurking in the undergrowth near you.