The Six-spot Burnet Moth.
My mum had a funny story she used to like to tell about the Six-spot Burnet Moth.
I have always been in love with wildlife, even as a tiny kid. My Dalmation dog, Gyp, Snails in the garden, the annual visit to London Zoo. I had an encyclopedia of Animal Life with black and white drawings that I would spend hours tracing and then colouring in.
Well back in the nineteen hundreds (probably around ’61/62) it was the custom for the family to go out for a drive in their new automobile and so we did and we stopped in a lay-by beside a grassy meadow for a picnic. Us children went to play in the grass. It was full of these beautiful little moths. Have you seen them fly? their wings create a little sort of red centre surrounded by a black mist. I was fascinated.
I couldn’t bear to leave them and when it came time to go I gathered as many as I could and filled up my pockets with them, then of course I let them go in the car.
My family were not great on wildlife and freaked out a bit at the time but my mum used to love telling that story about her cheeky little monkey. Happy days.
I filled my pockets up again today.
Fortunately for the animals I don’t really have to fill my pockets up any more because they have invented SD cards.
A Tramp in the Woods 
So beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like them. Thank you.
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Thank you Gigi 🙂 All cities should have at least a hundred acres set aside for woodland and meadow.but I suppose that they would get squashed. Thank heavens for train stations. Love to Maggie 🙂
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I love this story and its associated photos. I’ve never seen such a moth!
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I am really glad that you liked the post 🙂 I really liked your post about hiking with Grizzly Bears, it puts my little stroll in the meadow into perspective 🙂 I would love to have a few dangerous animals over here. All that we really have are Wild Boar and although some people are a bit scared of them they are just like Deer and run from us. 🙂
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Thanks so much! I have never seen a wild boar. Are they native to the UK? I’ve heard rumors of reintroducing brown bears to northern Wales and Scotland. Have you heard anything about that? Intact ecosystems are where it’s at 🙂
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I know of an eccentric millionaire in Scotland with a 50,000 acre estate who says that he is going to fence it off and re-introduce Bears and Wolves and I think that is a great plan. We only have Wild Boar in East Sussex because Sir Paul McCartney did the same thing with them and they escaped. 🙂 There is a lot of argument about how native our Wild Boar are. They are a native species but the ones running around now came from a variety of different sources and there is a lot of DNA testing being done. It comes down to one thing, if you want to shoot them then you say these are not native. Where I live now the Forestry Commission want to remove them from the forest and there is a big cull planned for later this year. The Boar will run away from the shooting and disperse. The FC will only cull on their own land so the animals that escape will be free to breed unmolested and over a much larger area. Although the FC’s actions are upsetting a lot of local people who like the Boar I am sure that the end result will be many more animals over a much larger area. The only thing that can control the Boar numbers is going to be the reintroduction of Wolves (and Crocodiles in our rivers) 🙂
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