5-10 July 2015. Wingfield Basin, Bruce Peninsula, ON. A slight departure from my usual posting here, but I can hardly resist sharing with you this moth, a hummingbird-lookalike. I know next to nothing about moths and had it not been for an encounter with some Hummingbird Clearwings about three summers ago, I wouldn’t have been able to put a name to them this week.
But here they are, true moths with a body or thorax about the size of the terminal segment of your little finger and the hovering, nectar-dipping behaviour of a hummingbird. My limited collection of reference books tells me only that there are just two species of ‘clearwing’ moths like this in the north-east. They are members of the tantalizingly named Sphinx or Hawk Moth family. That alone is enough to make me want to know more; but that’s for another time.
Hanging at the flowers doorstep, they used their almost one-inch long proboscis to draw nectar from deep within the bright blue depths of Vipers Bugloss, working their way almost, but not quite, methodically up the spire. Just as I began to feel I could anticipate their next move they’d vanish in a wisp – and then reappear a few feet away.
Getting a photograph was an exercise in patient ambush. If I just tried to follow them around snapping at any apparent opportunity, my results were mediocre. I’m no expert in the technical aspects of photography; it took quite a bit of effort to dredge up memories of the interplay of shutter speed, ISO and depth of field to come up with a strategy for a decent picture. Their wings beat so quickly that it wasn’t until I shot at 1/1250th of a second that I could freeze the motion.
And just in case we lose focus entirely, here’s a shot of a real hummingbird, a Ruby-throated Hummingbird.
