Hey friends! Welcome to my first Butterfly tale of 2025!!

Although to be honest its actually about moths, Emperor moths to be precise.

Lets rewind a few months…late last year I was able to watch a few Emperor moth caterpillars form their chrysalises in my garden, unfortunately the plant they were attached to became damaged in one of those really nasty storms we had and I didn’t want the little guys to end up drowning on the floor of my wildspace so I rescued them!

They’ve been living in a little netted pod in my butterfly house all winter and emerged at the beginning of April! It was so damn exciting I genuinely thought that they’d probably died in the storm, but I ended up with a gorgeous male and two gigantic females. I grow two of their favourite caterpillar food plants so it was super easy to give them both a pot of heather and meadowsweet.

The three of them all emerged within about half an hour of each other and by the evening the male was mating with one of the females and the next morning she was laying eggs! 

The Emperor moth (Saturnia Pavonia) is the UK’s only silk moth and builds an amazing hairy cocoon to pupate inside. The females can have a wingspan of up to around 10cm, while the males are slightly smaller at 6-ish cm. Sadly this family of moths don’t feed in their adult form and only live a few short weeks, so once they emerged I didn’t keep them more than 72 hours.

Over a few days they laid like 250-300 eggs! So exciting!!

Just to point out my butterfly raising disclaimer, I’m only rescuing the ones I can identify as eggs as some caterpillars can be tricky to raise or are protected species. If I don’t trust that I can look after them properly and give them the right food plant/proper environment then my plan is always to just leave them alone.

I’m so pleased to have recused these three and I’m hoping that as I got them to breed that maybe some of the eggs will hatch and I’ll be able to raise their babies all the way through to pupation (these eggs wont be moths until next spring!) and release them on mass next year and hopefully they’ll breed in the wild, which should give a serious boost to local numbers!

Interestingly the males fly during the day while the females fly at night!

I’ve took so many photos of them, the females were so placid and she was quite happy to sit on my hand for her close ups, she was almost too heavy to fly!

I couldn’t get any photos of the release because being moths it had to be at night and due to the fact that there is zero light pollution where I live (super spooky!) if I go outside and turn on a light its moth central.

Although I did see one of the females on the heather in my wildspace the next day.

I really hope you enjoyed this little slice of mothy goodness! I feel super privileged to have been able to protect these guys and I’m hoping to be able to write another post about their caterpillars soon!

As always thank you so much for reading this post and have a great week!

ps. Happy Easter!