Last Thursday while walking up our lane I saw Alfie, one of the neighbourhood cats, with his nose deep in a sedge plant, clearly on the hunt. I wondered if he was after a mouse or some similar small critter, and bobbed down to have a look. At first glance, from the head of it and the way it was rearing up, it looked like a small snake, but I then realised it was an elephant hawk moth caterpillar (Deilephila elpenor). These are huge caterpillars, and I guess the moths are named after their caterpillars’ similarity to an elephant’s trunk.
Elephant hawk moth. Photo by Orchi.
As a defence mechanism, the caterpillar will rear up on its front legs. It did it to me again as I was holding it: it’s quite impressive! The caterpillars overwinter as chrysalids in leaf debris on the ground, and metamorphose into their adult moth form in May the following year.
The caterpillars feed on willowherbs (Epilobium) and bedstraws (Galium), such as Galium verum (Lady’s bedstraw), and have been known to feed on fuschias as well. None of these grow up our lane so I’m not sure what the caterpillar was feeding on, or whether it was looking for somewhere to overwinter. Interestingly, last year Chap rescued another elephant hawk moth caterpillar from Alfie at about the same spot. Both times we put the caterpillar in among our densely-planted and sheltered flower beds, and hoped that they would be able to successfully overwinter there.