Yesterday as usual we went off to the train station to send the wife off to work. Sitting around doing nothing unusual, discussing the news and stuff, the time passed and eventually the train pulled into the station and she got out of the car. As she did she jumped backwards and shouted what the hell is *that*??”
I couldn’t see what it was from where I was so instead of doing what I usually do, drive along beside the train waving until I have to turn off for home, I hopped out of the car to see what had excited her so much.
Clearly, or maybe not so clearly, it was something large. The wife suggested later what surprised her was to see a ‘branch’ moving along the floor! The ‘branch’ can be seen at the base of the tree as a bit of ‘speckling, and turned out to be a *very* large moth of a kind I’ve not seen before and I could see what she meant. This was a *big* moth!!
Since it was obviously hurt badly, I took it home. There was nothing I could do to save it so thought it would serve a purpose is only to the children as an example of it’s species.
These photos are just to show you how big it was…
… I *did* release it into the garden somewhere safe from the ants, spiders and birds of course to see if it would perhaps be able to lay its eggs, but it was almost incapable of movement by then so was still in the same position some time later.
I say ‘was’ because sadly it died overnight. This morning I picked it up and lay it on one of the chilli plants with its wings spread to give one last picture of its size – which was similar to that of a large sparrow! Now I’m trying to look it up on the web to see if I can identify what species it was and how widespread it is around NSW.
The Eclectic Interweb 
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