Sunday 15 November 2015

Elusive























The first time I set eyes on a humming-bird Hawk-moth was  around ten years ago.  I remember it was a hot summer and I just happened to spot it hovering around one of the flower boxes.  They seemed to have a particular love of Bizzie Lizzies.  Subsequently, we made sure that we always had the flowers in the garden to try and tempt them in.  We saw them twice more,  always when the summer was hot.  I've not seen one in England in the last five years.

So it was a bit of a surprise to see one zooming around the Fox's Brush in the flower bed  during the last week of October.

They are a thing of beauty, with their long tongues dipping in and out of the flowers.  They move quickly but make it look effortless.  I imagine to keep it's wings beating at that speed they need a lot of nectar to maintain it.

Frustratingly, there was a trinity of factors that conspired to make it difficult to photograph it.  Bad light, a small fast moving subject and a camera focus that refused to do just that.  Out of forty shots there were only these ones that actually were passable enough to put on the blog.