A pair of trunks

You may recall, dear reader, the frisson of excitement at our discovery of a caterpillar of the Elephant Hawkmoth in our garden, chomping its way through willowherb leaves. Then began the "Where is it?", "Here it is!" game as we lost and found it umpteen times over several days.

In an effort to track its movements, I found some short bamboo canes and marked the places that it had been seen. These traced a gentle curve across the rockery and all then seemed calm once more.

That is until two days ago when we discovered that there were actually two caterpillars, one by Stick 2 and one by Stick 3. Double the fun, double the willowherb chomping. Yesterday, they were both in the vicinity of Stick 3, and we wondered if there might be a territorial dispute over a particular willowherb stem. Thankfully there was not.

Both caterpillars are growing quickly, at least half as long again as when we found the first one 12 days ago, so they may be quite close to pupating. Gauging their length is a bit tricky, however, because they're usually performing acrobatics on a willowherb stem. And obviously they can stretch out if they're trying to chomp a difficult-to-reach leaf. So who knows if they have attained the 80-85mm which the ID books say is their maximum size?

The bigger question might be whether any pupae would survive an Orkney Winter. And the absolute jumbo question is whether we will be able to watch the adult moths emerge next June. We're going to need some sort of spirit animal with a good memory to remind us next Spring...