Toadflax Brocade Caterpillar (Photo by L.Dolata)

Dear Readers, some of my fondest childhood memories are of hanging out with the caterpillars in our tiny back garden. We had cinnabar moth caterpillars, looking like tiny tubular rugby players in their ‘uniforms’ of yellow and black. They would denude the ragwort flowers until there was nothing left but a few stumps, before moving on to the next plant.

One year, I ‘rescued’ five caterpillars and fed them in a plastic box until they pupated. Then, I put the pupae in a big sweet jar, with twigs so that they could climb up and their wings could unfurl. We then checked the bottle (which was under the stairs along with the gas metre) every day. Alas! One day we looked, to find four perfectly pristine, newly-emerged green and red cinnabar moths, and one sad soul who had gotten stuck during emergence and died.

We released the survivors early next morning, but my brother and I decided to hold a funeral for the one who didn’t make it. The moth was interred in a matchbox, along with a ball of cottonwool, and we made a ‘tombstone’ out of a fragment of old kitchen tile. We wrote ‘Gone, but Not Forgotten’ on the tile in wax crayon, and proceeded to lower the matchbox into a pre-dug hole with all due ceremony.

It’s funny what you learn from such a seemingly trivial experience – that caring and preparing for things often isn’t enough, that things that you love die, the importance of ritual, and the indifference of the natural world. Strangely, I have always found that indifference somehow comforting – so much of what happens really isn’t personal. A virus, or a bacteria, doesn’t have it in for you, it’s just doing what it does. It doesn’t care if you’re famous, or rich, or a wonderful person. There is something about shrugging and getting on with it, about not getting ‘snagged’ on the unfairness of events, that is very liberating. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t many terrible things that can and should be prevented. Balance is all, in this as in so many other things.

Cinnabar moth caterpillar (PhotoI, Tony Wills, CC BY 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

My favourite caterpillars of all, though, were the woolly bears.

Two Garden Tiger Moth Caterpillars (Photo by Baykedevries, CC BY-SA 3.0 NL <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nl/deed.en&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

I used to handle them all the time, although the hairs are supposed to irritate the skin – I distinctly remember having two of them ‘race’ up my arms. They eat docks and nettles, and are the most bumbling, inoffensive of beasts. I learned a truly horrific lesson from a woolly bear that I was, again, rearing in a plastic box (Stork Margarine if I remember correctly). The caterpillar had stopped eating, and I was expecting it to pupate. Instead, as I watched, it literally burst, and what seemed like dozens of tiny maggots emerged. The poor caterpillar had clearly been parasitised by a wasp. It was all that I could do not to drop the box. Every kind of body horror ever dreamed up by a movie-maker has a parallel somewhere in the insect kingdom, I’m sure.

But generally, my lifelong interest in invertebrates was nurtured by my contact with caterpillars and slugs, spiders and flies. There is so much to learn, and so much to understand. And when people talk about ‘plants for pollinators’, we are increasingly thinking about not just feeding the adults with nectar and pollen, but feeding the larvae on docks and nettles, ragwort and grasses. My friend L sent me the photo of the lovely Toadflax Brocade caterpillar above, nibbling away on some toadflax, a most attractive plant. We could all do with leaving some ‘weeds’ in our gardens, especially as insect populations are under such pressure. I hate the thought of children no longer interacting with caterpillars, the most inoffensive and lovable of the many insects in our garden (though anyone trying to grow cabbages might not agree). Who knows what passion for the natural world might grow from such a humble beginning?

Toadflax Brocade Moth (Photo by Ilia Ustyantsev athttps://www.flickr.com/photos/155939562@N05/41055576322)

Leg Update: Still blooming painful, but waiting to hear from the GP about possible remedies. In the meantime, watching re-runs of Masterchef and Bake-Off -The Professionals. And will probably return to my bed on the first floor today, which will make everything feel a bit more normal. Fingers crossed I can get down again (joke – if I don’t think I can get down, I won’t go up 🙂 )