Our Caterpillars

My husband's uncle and his wife came to stay at the weekend. We had a wonderful time together visiting the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and then the Robert the Bruce festival. However I think the highlights for the boys was the wonderful big fat caterpillars Uncle Tony (a doctor of entomology) brought for us to look after!

When they arrived they were huge and fat as cocktail sausages, very active and surprisingly strong. He gave the boys 5 to look after and we named them Sausage, Bacon, Egg, Tea pot and Beans!

Now they have crawled into little rings and hidden themselves under the leaves we left in their tin for food. Uncle Tony says they will soon go all shiny and this will be their chrysalis. We need to put their tin outside and then let them sleep out the winter. We will bring them in come March next year and take the lid off, putting a net tube over for the resulting moths to fly out into when they are ready.
We have been told they will become Elephant Hawk Moths, which look like this.
We will give an update post when something happens!
We can't wait and have launched into a wealth of creepy crawly based activities!