Metoeca foedalis (污斑纹野螟).
Through a lot of trial and error I am trying to improve my skills at photographing very small subjects. One early result is this common pearl moth: it ranges across Africa, southern Asia, Australia and has been introduced to South America, though this one here was ranging no farther than around a cluster of shrubs in urban Changsha.
carmina uel caelo possunt deducere lunam,Virgil, Ecl. VIII.69-71. My translation.
carminibus Circe socios mutauit Vluxi,
frigidus in pratia cantando rumpitur anguis.
Songs can pluck the moon down from the sky, through song Circe transformed the companions of Ulysses [into swine], and through singing, the snake, cool in the meadow, is burst asunder.
I have always liked trains. The old ones were the best, of course, their soot-black engines venting bursts of steam and chuffing links of stylised white smoke, and the carriages rattling and yawing and the wheels violently clanging—so much might and effort, yet producing such a gay and toy-like effect. And then the way the landscape seemed to rotate like a vast, slow wheel, or to keep opening like a fan, and the telegraph wires dipped and slid, and birds flew past the window backwards, slowly, effortfully, like so many discarded bits of black rag.John Banville, Ancient Light (London: Viking, 2012), p. 187.
A common sight in Autumn in Changsha. It could be terias hecabe (宽边黄粉蝶) or eurema mandarina (北黄粉蝶): both species are apparently present in Hunan and they are not clearly distinguishable from any clear morphological characteristics.
