On the following photograph you can see a small moth ...
... that I photographed today, earlier today, about 9 o'clock in the morning ...
... on the facade of the relatively large store that offers mostly Italian shoes ... and some other stuff made of leather and similar synthetic materials ... from what I saw from the outside, through the glass ...
... in the supermarket and storage area at the outskirts of the city.
Some minutes ago, while preparing this post, I found out that this is the Operophtera brumata ... and is known also as The winter moth. It is one of very few lepidopterans of temperate regions in which adults are active in late fall and early winter ... and here, at the warmer edges of these temperate regions The winter moth can be encountered throughout all winter ... although I rarely notice him because I'm not in the insect search mood in that period, and spend most of my time indoors working on artworks and photographs in the PC.
Today wasn't a particularly cold day, but it certainly wasn't warm, and was really cool to encounter an insect outside in these winter conditions.
The larvae of these moths feed on foliage, especially soft, newly formed buds of a wide variety of self seeding and cultivated trees ... so they can be a bit of a pest if they appear in big numbers.
The adults have some endothermic properties, they can produce a certain amount of heat internally by biochemical processes and that explains their pretty unique winter activity. I found only this simplistic information on the Internet, so I can't explain how this actually works in insects.
After taking these few moth - shots ...
... I took a look at the surroundings ... some people were walking ... some people were working ...
... the usual atmosphere in that part of the city.
(Enlargeable)
:) Some have mistaken the mailbox for the garbage can ... that was a nice little detail ... so I took this shot ... and that's it ... soon I was driving home, back to my small seaside town.
As always in these posts on HIVE, the photographs are my work - THE END.