How the death’s head hawkmoth transmits terror and confusion

The Guardian

One recent 31 October, I jumped from my chair at a sinister squeaking by my bookshelf. I thought it was a mouse but it was the perfect harbinger of Halloween: a death’s head hawkmoth.

The largest moth to fly in Britain is a rare migrant but even in late autumn individuals can be swept across the Channel. “My” hawkmoth had pupated in a plant pot after my children and I reared some of its personable caterpillars.

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