Crawling Creatures
This weekend has been kind of a bust for making any headway on that giant pile of dirt in our driveway. Contrary to the weather forecast, it's been kind of a crappy weekend: Without the sun, it's COLD. And dreary. Add to that a Halloween party and a half marathon (I'm happy to put on a costume, but the running is Kirk's thing), and motivation levels for picking up a shovel are pretty low.
So the only item of note in the garden this weekend is this guy:
Jonas found this "calwapitter" munching on some carrot leaves. A quick Google search led us to a cool caterpillar identification website, which revealed that what we have here is a (future) Black Swallowtail butterfly.
According to Wikipedia, the blue ones are female and the yellow ones are male. We also learned that these are otherwise known as Parsnip Swallowtails, because they lay their eggs in plants of that family (which is why we found ours in the carrots).
I know I have a history of larvae-squishing, but so far this one (and we've only seen one, not dozens) doesn't seem to be doing much damage. And Jonas likes him, so we'll let it go and see if he overwinters in his cocoon and flies away in the spring.
So the only item of note in the garden this weekend is this guy:
Jonas found this "calwapitter" munching on some carrot leaves. A quick Google search led us to a cool caterpillar identification website, which revealed that what we have here is a (future) Black Swallowtail butterfly.
According to Wikipedia, the blue ones are female and the yellow ones are male. We also learned that these are otherwise known as Parsnip Swallowtails, because they lay their eggs in plants of that family (which is why we found ours in the carrots).
I know I have a history of larvae-squishing, but so far this one (and we've only seen one, not dozens) doesn't seem to be doing much damage. And Jonas likes him, so we'll let it go and see if he overwinters in his cocoon and flies away in the spring.
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