Allotments 4 All

The girls found this on the allotment this morning and thought it was a snake. Can anyone tell us what it is and what it eats? as i've never seen one before and we can find it in our wildlife books 

This second one is a bit blurry but you can see it's tail better

It's an elephant hawkmoth caterpillar.  Great find!

http://ukmoths.org.uk/show.php?id=240

oh wow it's pink the girl's will love it, we have a butterfly tent in the backroom and it's in there at the moment.

Lovely could do with something eating rose bay willow herb, bit of a monster weed in the garden.

Thanks for that link. I've now worked out what the lovely moth was we found outside our backdoor recently.  ;D
Sadly it was dead  but it makes sense after reading about them as it was near my honeysuckle arch.

Quite often when you find these hawk moth catterpillars crawling around, they are getting ready to pupate. Therefore I suggest that you put it in a container half filled with dry multi purpose compost. You will probably find that the caterpillar 'disappears' but after about a week you can look in the compost and find the pupa. Put it back into the compost and put the container in a cool dry place. Eventually, probably in the spring, the moth will emerge.   

What a little beauty, you lucky thing.

Hope to see the end result in the spring  :)

 :) jealous!!/ shades x

It did pupate, do i have to what until spring for it to hatch, if so where do i keep it? At the moment it's in a butterfly tent out of the sun in my back room.