Appalachians

I was out yesterday photographing butterflies and one of the things that I wanted to capture was a particular moth emerging from it’s cocoon. It seems to take them a long time to emerge and inflate their wings but I really wanted to photograph this so I sat down in the grass and waited and watched.

There are a couple of houses overlooking the meadow and after about twenty minutes of sitting motionless in the grass I saw a chap come out of a house and start walking towards me.

An elderly gentleman, he looked like a bit of a character. Walking with a stick and wearing a leather waistcoat and a cowboy hat, he had a silver badge on his waistcoat like a silver star but it was a butterfly.

“Are you all right?”

Well, I explained what I was doing and it turned out that he was a bit of a butterfly enthusiast too.

“Have you seen the Appalachians, they’re lovely, little black and white spotted ones?”

“Oh, you mean the Marbled Whites?”

“Appalachians I call them, I keep horses you see.”

Appalachians it is then, it makes perfect sense to me. I am indebted to Tony for telling me that, “if I come out to this field at eleven o’clock at night it is alive with glow worms.” That is something I must see. So here are some more Appalachians for my friend.

It wasn’t long after Tony left when Buster stopped his van to come over and see if I was okay (they’ll get used to me). A local historian he has lived here for seventy years and remembers when the quarry was working. He also told me the glow worm story but he didn’t have a funny name for Marbled Whites 🙂