The Nature Blog

For those of you know I don’t know personally, one of my hobbies is keeping and breeding leaf insects. The typical hobbyist food of leaf insects in the UK is bramble so every week or so I find myself out in the countryside with a carrier bag and pair of scissors taking some leaves back home (all whilst trying not to get spotted by someone else so I don’t have to explain myself and look like a weirdo!).

At this time of year of course hundreds of different invertebrates use bramble as a food source or a place to hide and so I do my best to choose leaves without spiders on, cookoo spit and so on so they can carry on to adulthood.

However a few weeks ago I missed something. And that something was a couple of caterpillars. These lived perfectly happily with the leaf insects, feeding on the fresh bramble leaves that I gave them until they both pupated.

In the picture above you can see both one of the caterpillars and the other having already turned into a pupae.

The questions is – what are these pupae going to turn into? My assumption due to (a) their size and (b) the way they both pupated down on the ground rather than attaching themselves to a plant are that they are moths rather than butterflies but only time will tell. I also believe they are the same species due to the similarity in appearance of both the caterpillars and they resultant pupae.

Assuming they hatch out successfully I’ll try to get some photos and let you know what appeared!

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photo credit: Benimoto

Whilst I love to see butterflies, I am far from an expert and so regularly find myself leafing through books and websites to learn more about a species I have seen recently.

During my research I have come across a number of useful online resources for identifying British butterflies and their caterpillars and thought that it might be useful for other readers to gather the best resources into one place.

Possibly the best place to start your identification journey is with a visit to Butterfly Conservation’s UK Butterflies site which has neatly categorized all of the UK butterfly species, with clear photos of each making identification reasonably easy for most species.

As well as the photos, this site also groups butterflies by type, helping to narrow down your search and also has a handy “Flying This Week” chart on the left-hand side of the page which is a great place to start your hunt.

Butterfly Conservation’s main website also has some very useful resources including a complete A to Z listing of UK butterflies and a special “butterfly identifier” where you can select options from a form which will then offer up possible identifications.

Also worth mentioning is UK Leps which has lots of nice photos and information but unfortunately there is no overview feature. Because of this, UK Leps is probably not so useful for identification when compared to the two Butterfly Conservation websites but once you have worked out what your butterfly is, the site provides plenty more useful information on the species.

Whilst the flying adult butterflies are often the most visible form, it is of course not unusual to find caterpillars and these can potentially be even more problematic to identify.

What’s That Caterpillar is a great resource for identification of British caterpillars. To make your identification a little easier, try to identify the actual plant that you find the caterpillar on and then use one of the various lists of larval food plants to narrow down the options.

Some of the best lists of larval food plants I have found are Foremost Butterflies and Over The Garden Gate.

Lastly, if you have some top identification websites that you use for lepidoptera, please leave me a comment so we can all benefit from your knowledge

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