Wolves Wild

A comma butterfly which found a resting place on the same patch of riverside leaves by the Exe as the damselflies featured a couple of days ago.

Two bird families near the jetty at Topsham on the River Exe. The black swans, native to Australia, are from a long-established colony at Dawlish along the coast. They may be an adult pair and their cygnets from the previous year, now almost full grown/

The shelduck ducklings were more recently hatched. Unusually, they were being cared for by both parents, and seemed to have established a routine of spending the nights crowded up in a heap just above the high tide mark of the jetty.

The black swan family on the River Exe at Topsham near to low tide. The four are probably an adult pair and two well-grown offspring.

Banded demoiselles resting on leaves by the river at Exeter. The blue ones are male, the green ones female.

In pictures taken in early July, cinnabar moth caterpillars crowd on their preferred food plant, a ragwort.

Ragworts have evolved poisons to discourage insects and other animals from eating them. Cinnabar moths in turn evolved to be immune to these poisons, to be able to store them in their own bodies to discourage their predators. That’s handy when their adult form is quite large for a moth, day flying, brightly coloured and generally quite conspicuous.

The moth advertises it’s bad to eat by its warning colouration: black and yellow stripes in the caterpillar, black and scarlet in the adult.

Pictures zooming in on one of the greater black-backed gulls on the weir at Exeter in yesterday’s post. The pictures were all taken from the same vantage point on the footbridge across the river, using the camera in a mobile phone.