30/11/2025
About 10 days ago, this 12-centimetre, fat-as-a-finger caterpillar descended from the shrub we’d been watching it voraciously consume for weeks and set off across the wide, mudded plain in front of our Camp House, straight past the outdoor lunch table where we dined oblivious to the voyage taking place right besides us. Little did we know that just before lunch one of our guests had become the last of a string of ento-enthusiasts to photograph the juicy marvel fattening up at the water’s edge. It was only when Son Kumar was packing up the chairs and tables, a good thirty or forty metres away, that he spotted the great expedition in progress.
When a Death’s Head Hawkmoth caterpillar is ready to pupate, it buries itself underground and forms a hard brown casing in which to metamorphose. We expected the soft ground beneath its foraging site to be the ideal habitat, but it instead chose to traverse the vast landscape of freshly swept, compacted earth; its yellow-glowing, speckled flesh surely a tempting eye-catch for feathered predators. We hovered like living scarecrows, marvelling at its journey and reading its decisions: the sudden U-turn when a promising dark corner turned out to be firmer soil, and the attempt to burrow into the sandy mortar of the stone wall that led to nothing more than a wedge between a rock and a hard place.
At least an hour after determined exploration, the caterpillar found itself upon the soft mound of an ants’ overburden. It reached the summit, then clambered into the hollow of brood chambers and slipped out of sight. We wondered how the ants would react to this interloper, but they appeared unbothered by its presence. We can only hope the caterpillar has burrowed deep and pupated safely. A fully formed hawkmoth can emerge in a matter of weeks, but with winter setting in, it’s likely we’ll be waiting until at least Feb or March.
