6 
MARCH MOTH. 
79 
The following observations refer to the “March Moth,” of which 
the Looper Caterpillars appear about the same time with, and are not 
very unlike those of, the Winter Moth :— 
March Moth. Anisopteryx cesculciria Steph. 
Anisopteryx ^escularia. 
March Moth; winged male, wingless female, and band of eggs. 
On March 29th Mr. W. Stedman forwarded me from the Dunsdale 
Fruit Farm, Westerliam, Kent, specimens of the wingless females of 
the March Moth, together with bands of their down-embedded eggs, 
which they were then laying on Plum-twigs. The moths were about 
three-eighths of an inch long, brown or fawn-colour above, shading to 
grey below, with darker head and eyes, and dark pencil of hair at the 
end of the tail, and might be generally described as thickly pear-shaped 
(the pencil of hairs at the end of the tail answering to a broad, short 
fruit-stalk). The hairs were long, the six legs very long, and the 
moths, though sometimes quite quiet, were able at pleasure to walk 
very rapidly; one that I timed as to speed walked the length of six 
inches in twenty-five seconds. The wings were to all appearance 
totally absent, and the downy coating of the moths very smooth and 
silky. 
Mr. W. Stedman remarked that in the previous season he had 
found several Plum-trees suffering from the attacks of insects, and 
whilst pruning on that day, namely, March 29th, he had found the 
wingless moths, which he forwarded to me, in the act of laying the 
eggs which were attached to the Plum-twigs sent. 
The twigs were quite small (none of them as much as a quarter of 
an inch across), and the bands of eggs which were then laid (or being 
laid) varied from about a quarter to half an inch in breadth at the 
widest part, but did not always quite encircle the stem. They were 
deposited with beautiful regularity, and showed to the naked eye as if 
laid in almost precisely parallel rows along the twig, and were embedded 
in down supplied by the parent moth from the pencil at the end of her 
tail. In the largest band I counted twenty-nine rows, and as each of 
these rows (as nearly as I could count or estimate) was composed of 
upwards of eighteen of the bright, shining eggs, the whole number in 
this ring would be well over five hundred. 
