As we weren’t sure how long the good weather would last, Karen and I took the day off work and headed up to the Brecon Beacons. I’ve seemed to have missed autumn colours over the Brecons for about four years, so we headed up to the waterfalls near Ystradfellte (middle of the Brecon Beacons National Park). The weather as forecast was wonderful and warm all day: I spent most of the morning trying to photograph Dippers at the waters edge. There was one lone Small Tortoiseshell that stopped on Karen’s cap for a couple of minutes: it soon nipped off again after spending a second on one of the few ‘seats’ made by some of the chopped tree-stumps. We left about 1:45pm, and on the road back from Ystradfellte (the road to Sennybridge / Heol Senni) I noticed there were caterpillars on the road. In fact, there were a lot of caterpillars on the road (some no doubt had been squashed by the traffic, even though there aren’t that many cars that use this road). We stopped the car and I found out that these caterpillars were all Fox Moth caterpillars – there were loads of them – probably between 50-100 on this stretch of road about half a mile long. I picked up about 5 from a small area of the road and put them a little way across on the grass. I’m not sure if they were crossing the road or just warming up on it: I can only guess how many caterpillars might have been on this stretch of land. Not a good place for them to crawl though, no matter how good the weather was.
Michael
The stretch of walk near Ystradfellte leading to the waterfalls of Sgwd Y Eira, lovely in the autum sun.
This must have been the most Dippers I had seen along this walk. They're still difficult to photograph, mind you.
The one brief Small Tortoiseshell that visited as we sat down near the first waterfall.
Venturing back from Ystradfellte, there were loads of these Fox Moth caterpillars crossing the road. They're quite big, as you can see.
These were only 5 I picked up from a 10 yard square on the road where we stopped.
I hoped they'd be safer in the grass, though they may not stay there for long!
