Afternoon doing IDs with this amazing field guide from @savebutterflies.bsky.social

Working on my first love again today ❤️

I LOVE THESE. Let me add this adorable orange tip that was digitized during the iCollections project. Here they are! And here's "A History of Shropshire" which features a snippet about this exact specimen. Famous!

Woah hello new followers! Welcome!

Right now I'm taking some time off work due to stress (😬🤒), but hopefully when I get back I'll have plenty of sick Leps to share with you all. To tide you over, here is a little elephant hawkmoth caterpillar I saw a couple months ago.

And obligatory man with dogs post

No luck with the slime moulds but plenty of fungus about. Highlights:

Just arrived! Can I join the list? Paying the lep tax for your services:

Well, thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, here's the original publication, free for us to read. I was quite surprised to find that these aberrations may be naturally occurring.

Enter: Bizarre cinnabar moth aberrations. These guys are almost entirely red or peach, perfect for making a trans flag out of leps! Most aberrations are nonsense, so I was very curious about these here, as they are all from RW Watson's collection. Surely he published these?

My next stop? How about a red moth that I can desaturate a little bit. That leaves mostly burnet moths and cinnabar moths. My predicament? These little fellows are more black than red. (OR SO I THOUGHT!)

Now, the UK does not really have pink butterflies or moths. They're very uncommon anywhere, and our closest creature is the small elephant hawk moth. Kinda pink, kinda not. Very pointy shaped.

Okay, so I'm writing something for my staff intranet for Trans Awareness week and made up this image to go along with it, using images from our digitised collections. I discovered a strange little story in my hunt for pink lepidoptera...🧵

#digitalcollections #lepidoptera #naturalhistory