This brightly coloured day-flying moth is often mistaken for a butterfly by casual observers and not without good reason. It is brightly coloured and as I say is seen fluttering around the reserve on the sunniest of days. This time of year it is easy to find flying around low to the ground looking for a suitable plant, generally Common Ragwort (Jacobaea vulgaris). The relationship between these two is interesting, the plant contains alkaloids dangerous to some animals classically horses. However, it is these very poisons that are ingested by the developing caterpillars making them poisonous and bitter tasting to most would be predators.
The cuckoo is one predator that can stomach these strikingly beautiful caterpillars with their black and yellow warning colouration.
Today I followed a female moth as she visited the freshly growing ragwort plant still only a half a dozen inches high, some she laid eggs on the under leaf, others she rejected, for whatever reason, known only to her.
The eggs were clustered in batches of 15 or 40 depending on the space available, tiny pale yellow pearlescent spheres, looking back at my records for last year, I photographed some very small Cinnabar caterpillars measuring about 5/16ths long on the 1st of July and by then the Ragwort was almost full grown. In a months time then or maybe less the babies will appear and start munching their way through the leaves. I also have images of fully developed caterpillars all but stripping a Ragwort taken on the 11th of July, so they develop pretty quickly.
Two things spring to mind:- Baby cuckoos are presumably not fed these by their host parents for obvious reasons, even though (guessing) they, like their parents are tolerant to them, and by the time they are ripe for the eating by adults, they are getting ready to leave for Sub-Saharan Africa.
As an aside, there is still a Nightingale singing in the scrub on the way up to Ernie Hemsley Viewpoint.
The North Kent Marshes are a very special area and worth preserving at all cost.