Giant Leopard Moths

Last weekend I was setting the chickens up in their playpen when I came across this guy:


I couldn't get him (her?) to open up from this defense posture, but it was easily as big around as my index finger, and curled up it was about the diameter of a half dollar. It has red rings, and, as you can see, a seriously spiky black hairdo.

For the first time ever, my favorite caterpillar identification website let me down. It told me I was looking at a wooly bear, but I know that's not right. (You can see what I mean by checking out a wooly bear photo here.) 

Upon further googling, I found that this caterpillar is very similar to the wooly bear, which grows up to become a tiger moth. But my caterpillar is a Giant Leopard Moth, which is even cooler. Check out this photo from Wikipedia Commons:


That guy is prettier than most butterflies, so I decided not to feed it to the chickens. Not that I could have if I wanted to: Although I expected it to just stay curled up in a ball all day, when I went back to check on it, it was gone. I read that they like leafy shade, so I think it probably crawled under the beans to get away from the crazy human that kept annoying it on an otherwise beautiful day.

I'll be keeping an eye out to see if we end up with a Giant Leopard Moth in our garden, but it seems unlikely that I'd ever see it. They are nocturnal, and we just aren't out much in the dark now that the temperatures are dropping. 

Besides, they only live for a few days — just long enough to reproduce.

Oh well.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w...
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin...
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel...
Read more