Today’s portrait is the story of a nail-biting and narrow escape from death by an amazing creature.

Meet the Gum Emperor Moth who is the featured image in our Pet Parade.

I hope you will join Dash Kitten for the weekly parade of wonderful wordy and wordless posts and social media shares that our blogging friends conjure each week. This week carries on our bugs and butterflies theme

What Can You Photograph in a Hurry?

We were mowing the lawn today, a lovely New Zealand summer’s day. We have an electric mower so I manoeuvre the cable while Dash dad Paul mows. It’s fun to work together and when it’s finished we feel a joint sense of achievement at a job well done.

Suddenly Paul froze and stopped the mower. He looked down anxiously and I saw a sandy flicker on top of the dried grass. It looked like a piece of paper and I moved closer. I saw, to my astonishment, that we had narrowly escaped mangling a huge moth.

How Magnificent can a Moth be?

Opdiphthera Eucalypti commonly known by the friendlier name the ‘Gum Emperor Moth’ is not cute or tiny. Our beast had a wingspan of 10.5 cms. or 4 inches. I picked the moth up very very carefully with both hands to see if it was damaged. It seemed to climb onto my glove and I held my breath……..

If you want to discover more about Opdiphthera Eucalypti read here.

Photographing the Gum Emperor Moth

Carrying the large moth off the lawn I looked carefully but could see no damage to wings or its short chubby body. Thankfully it seemed undamaged and Paul had the sense to rush and grab my DSLR.

In the top picture, you can see my glove as I put my hand carefully down on the garden table for a picture.

Paul does not know how to use my DSLR.

I carefully held the moth and could not risk slipping my hand out of the glove or it might fly away. Paul had to learn how to hold a DSLR and focus on the moth all in about half a minute! He took as many pictures as he could, and he kept the moth in focus before it flew away.

I suggested using the automatic closeup setting as this was easiest to find. On the dial, this is a single stylised flower.

As you can see. Paul got some great pictures including the fine moth antennae which you can see beginning to appear above the wing tops in the second picture. They look like a dark grey bar near the top of the picture. These antennae look like long feathers when fully extended.

Join us to launch 2019 with an explosion of social media fun and colour with Pet Parade co-hosts Bionic Basil and the B Team and new Texans Barking from the Bayou.