An emperor of the insect world, a masterpiece painted in 50 shades of grey.
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The Giant Peacock is Europe’s largest moth – larger than many of our common garden birds.
Their magnificence is matched only by their tragically short lives. Nature has decided they cannot eat, their mouths are vestigial, and they are incapable of feeding. So, they sit surrounded by the nectar of a million flowers yet are denied their sweetness.
Instead they have been gifted with the ability to see, taste, and feel scents.
The male can sense the female from more than a kilometre away. Her feminine musk is carried on warm fickle breezes and invites their suitors to join them in one brief ecstatic dance.
The males will then slowly flutter to some sheltered spot and gently allow their life force to return to the earth. While she will set off on one last flight to find a safe place on which to lay her eggs. Then she too will return to the source.
This epic two tone ballet will be over in just a few short hours, rare it is that the Giant Peacock will ever see its first dawn.
Truly they are citizens of the moon.
So I leave this exhausted lover as he gently falls asleep within the loving arms of this young lemon tree.
His purpose is complete within the ecology of this mountain in this perfectly tragic moment.
“The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly”
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Photo: Giant Peacock Moth in Facinas. Courtesy of the author.