My Patio Wildlife

Recovering nicely from the Large White Butterflies that I bought with the plant, since then I've had loads visit and lay eggs, shall see what we have later on :)

About a month before this we found this lovely Garden Tiger caterpillar on umbifers, in a footpath where it is likely the council in their wisdom will come along and weed wack. So we brought it home as this species is one in serious decline for me to rear. He did really well for nearly a month, and finally right on time decided to pupate. I left him to it for the first 48 hours when it should be safe to check it and move it if needed and it still was in caterpillar. I was gutted wondering what I might have been able to do different to make sure it was ok. A day or so later (just in case) I had a check again and found 8 or 9 of these pupa in near it, now there is no possible way this happened after we brought it home, so out of curiousity I waited until some of them emerged expecting some parasitic wasp or something, and no it was Flesh Flies. I had no idea that flies would paratise a living caterpillar. Sad as it is, its nature and was interesting to see the results.

You know its true...

One of our many Zebra Jumpers with a fly prey.

Okay, one of my favorite flowers on my Patio/Balcony is Nasturtium, for one thing the flowers are really nice, it grows well quickly and it feeds loads of critters which is what 99.9% of all plants on my patio do. I have had rapeseed growing before but this year only one showed up, and my nasturtiums didn't reappear at all, and a few weeks back I noticed the Large Whites visiting the patio, so thought 'Well I'd better get something they can lay eggs on'. Went to my local place bought two 3" pots and was ready to plant them the next day when I saw this! Now you know that no Whites came along and laid eggs over night that hatched out and became caterpillars this big!! The nerve of them selling me Large White butterflies...lol In any case sadly a couple days later they turned out to be bird food for the family of Sparrow that had been frequenting my patio, and I only had three left as of a couple days ago. Two left home to pupate and one is still feeding up!

I think she is pretty amazing really, frumpy little thing...lol