Pieridae : 無料・フリー素材/写真
Pieridae / Giles Watson's poetry and prose
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示-継承 2.1 |
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| 説明 | I had a fascination with the Pieridae as a child. They were intent on turning our next-door neighbour’s cabbages into skeletons, and he had no objection to my patiently collecting all the caterpillars from his leaves. He didn’t know that I was keeping them in cages so that I could watch them turning into chrysalids. Some of them never became butterflies: after pupation, the chrysalids sprouted into strange and sickly flowers as the ichneumon flies - which had parasitized the caterpillars all of their lives - suddenly emerged. But others were more fortunate, and I would laugh with delight to see them clambering from their split skins, and climbing dizzily to the cage roof in order to dry their wrinkled, swollen wings. And then I would mark their wings with tiny spots of my mother’s nail-varnish, taking care to blow on them until all the acetone had evaporated. I would release them, and anxiously scour the garden with my butterfly net for days and weeks afterwards, hoping to catch one of my little released fairies and thank it for still being alive, before letting it go again.Once, I took a dead one and put it in a jar with some chlorine from our neighbours’ swimming pool. The wings turned a delicate and permanent pink, which proved, so my textbook told me, that the white pigmentation in the wings of cabbage whites is actually uric acid. My “uncle” Kenneth Giles, my father’s scientific colleague, after whom I had been named, heard that I had performed this experiment, and told my father that I would “beat him to a chair”. I never did. Perhaps the scientific impulse was too suffused with the uncertainties of delight. |
| 撮影日 | 2009-07-20 07:31:20 |
| 撮影者 | Giles Watson's poetry and prose , Oxfordshire, England |
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| カメラ | E8700 , NIKON |
| 露出 | 0.003 sec (1/296) |
| 開放F値 | f/6.2 |