{"id":13697,"date":"2021-04-04T20:14:16","date_gmt":"2021-04-05T03:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vicnhs.bc.ca\/?p=13697"},"modified":"2021-04-16T14:38:05","modified_gmt":"2021-04-16T21:38:05","slug":"april-4-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vicnhs.bc.ca\/?p=13697","title":{"rendered":"April 4"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p><strong>2021 April 4 <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Jeremy Tatum writes:\u00a0 I saw a <strong>Mourning Cloak<\/strong> (my first &#8221; non-Cabbage&#8221; of the year) this afternoon on Mount Tolmie \u2013 not on the reservoir, but in a little glade halfway down.\u00a0 Also there was a small moth settled on a tree-trunk.\u00a0 Just as I was wondering what it was, Gordon and Anne-Marie Hart appeared, and Gordon got a nice picture, which revealed that the moth was a pristine fresh <strong><em>Venusia<\/em><\/strong><strong>.\u00a0 <\/strong>I had originally erroneously identified it as <em>V. cambrica<\/em>.\u00a0 I am very grateful to Libby Avis for pointing out my mistake.\u00a0 In <em>cambrica<\/em> the little dashes along the outer margin are triangular in shape; in Gordon&#8217;s moth, they are all straight hyphens. Besides, it is too early in the season for <em>cambrica.\u00a0 <\/em>See also April 15, where I made the same mistake with another individual.\u00a0 Gordon&#8217;s moth is either <em>V. pearsalli <\/em>or <em>P. obsoleta<\/em>.\u00a0 Neither Libby nor I have ever been able to distinguish reliably between these two species.\u00a0 Perhaps they are really a single species.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Also on Mount Tolmie was a batch of <strong>Sheep Moth <\/strong>eggs around a twig of Snowberry.\u00a0 Some have holes in them, probably as a result of a parasitoid, and some are collapsed.\u00a0 \u00a0We&#8217;ll have to wait and see if any caterpillars hatch from the remainder.\u00a0 This moth has a long life-history.\u00a0 The eggs will have been laid last year, and they spent the winter in this form.\u00a0 The caterpillars will pupate late in the summer, and a second winter will be spent, this time as pupae, so the adult moths won&#8217;t emerge until nearly two years after the eggs were laid.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" style=\"width: 541px; margin: 5px;\" src=\"file:\/\/\/C:\/Users\/jtatum\/AppData\/Local\/Temp\/msohtmlclip1\/01\/clip_image002.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"pastedImage.png\" src=\"https:\/\/www.vicnhs.bc.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/pastedImage-36.png\" width=\"513.6\" height=\"346.5138632162662\" name=\"null\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>Venusia pearsalli\/obsoleta <\/em>(Lep.: Geometridae)\u00a0 Gordon Hart<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" style=\"width: 365px; margin: 5px;\" src=\"file:\/\/\/C:\/Users\/jtatum\/AppData\/Local\/Temp\/msohtmlclip1\/01\/clip_image004.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"pastedImage.png\" src=\"https:\/\/www.vicnhs.bc.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/pastedImage-37.png\" name=\"null\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Sheep Moth <em>Hemileuca eglanterina <\/em>(Lep.: Saturniidae)\u00a0 Jeremy Tatum<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>2021 April 4 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 Jeremy Tatum writes:\u00a0 I saw a Mourning Cloak (my first &#8221; non-Cabbage&#8221; of the year) this afternoon on Mount Tolmie \u2013 not on the reservoir, but in a little glade halfway down.\u00a0 Also there was a small moth settled on a tree-trunk.\u00a0 Just as I was wondering what it was, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-invertebrate-alert"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicnhs.bc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicnhs.bc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicnhs.bc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicnhs.bc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicnhs.bc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13697"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicnhs.bc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13765,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicnhs.bc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13697\/revisions\/13765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicnhs.bc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicnhs.bc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicnhs.bc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}