We spent Saturday afternoon at our company picnic. My wife and I fancy ourselves as keen observers of the subtle and minutiae in the ecosystems. In actuality, she's probably better than I am. Anyway, she spotted this very cool caterpillar on a stone path, so I had to take it's picture. It measured probably 3" long and was as fat as my thumb. Then the fun began - I know nothing about caterpillar ID.
I went online with my picture and, after working my way through several pages of the seemingly endless varieties of caterpillars, I found the identity of our mystery fellow. A White-Lined Sphinx moth. Which, in layman's terms, is one of my favorite critters at the butterfly bush - a hummingbird moth!!
Photo by Raymond Christensen
The caterpillar / butterfly / moth group could take a person years to figure out. I'm not ready to dedicate that kind of time, but I DO think they're pretty cool.
8 comments:
wolfie, try bugguide.net ; it's what all the lazy biologists use.
See, I was so excited to see you post that my comment was unreadable! That's what I thought it was! No, I really didn't have a clue but it's nice to hear you're at least outdoors.
You rock, nonetheless -
The title of this post caught my eye and I had to read it. Glad I did.
Cool!
Glad to see you out and about in your new environment Joe.
That is pretty cool and very similar to the caterpillars that were crawling all over the path I run at the park. I thought they were blowing leaves at first (because I was going so fast of course... j/k) but when I stopped to look, they weren't. Needless to say the rest of my run was spent looking at the ground instead of at the scenery, so not to squish any of them!
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