The caterpillar will burrow some depth underground before constructing its pupal chamber. The chrysalis, which is reddish, or blackish-brown in colour, is figured with the other stages on Plate 13.
The moth usually emerges the following June or July, but there are at least two records of its remaining in the chrysalis during two winters.
The southern portion of England appears to be the principal British home of this moth. It is more or less scarce in the midlands and northwards. In Scotland it has only been recorded from southern counties, and in his "Catalogue of the Lepidoptera of Ireland," Kane states that he has no certain record of its occurrence in that country. Widely distributed through central and southern Europe, extending northwards to south Sweden and Finland, and eastwards to Amurland, China, and Japan.
Stephens, writing of this species in 1828, remarked that about thirty years before that date, a specimen "was taken in June at Colney Hatch Wood, and a second in the neighbourhood of Esher." He also gives Rivelston Wood, near Edinburgh, as a locality, on the authority of Dr. Leach. A specimen was stated to have been seen in Cumberland in 1827 or 1828, and up to the year 1877 four other examples were reported, each from a different part of England. In the year last mentioned a specimen was recorded from Woodbridge, Suffolk, as taken in a rectory garden the previous midsummer (since ascertained that the moth was first seen there in 1875); an example was also found at rest on a tree trunk at Tuddenham, near Ipswich, in July, 1877, and one was reared on August 5, 1876, from a { 35} chrysalis found near Horham Rectory, Wickham Market, Suffolk. In 1878-9, caterpillars were met with at Leiston, Suffolk; the moth was found in the pine woods around Aldeburgh, 1881, and as many as forty specimens were taken in July and August, 1882, and rather more than twenty in August, 1919. In 1895, Lord Rendlesham, when driving through the fir woods in the neighbourhood of Woodbridge, noted two specimens in almost the same spot where he had taken some moths in 1892-93. Mr. F. Mellusson, writing from this district (August 2, 1895), stated that fifteen specimens had been taken, and that others could have been captured; also that about one hundred larvæ were then feeding in confinement. He also mentioned that 1895 was the fourth year out of five that the insect had occurred there. A male moth was found at rest on an oak trunk near Southwold, Suffolk, on July 29, 1900. On August 13, 1906, the Rev. A. P. Waller saw a worn specimen on a pine trunk in the rectory garden at Woodbridge. He also noted a pupa on September 30, 1917. (Plate 12, Fig. 2.)