Have You Seen the Hickory Horned Devil?

Tuesday evening around dusk, Kenny started yelling "Hey, ya gotta see this!" He was standing near the fence in the back yard by the sand-pile and a cluster of three trees. I didn't pay too much attention, absorbed as I was by a pile of papers on my desk and the task of trying to enter the bills I paid into my computer money program. Then I heard more excited yells from other kids in the neighborhood, so I decided to investigate. The object of all the excitement was a long (5-6 inches), thick (nearly an inch), pale green caterpillar with the most extraordinary spines on its back, the most terrifying black spots which resembled huge eyes, and antennae which were also fearsome to behold. It wasn't something I had ever seen before, and it was certainly not anything anyone in the neighborhood had seen. Kenny commandeered a jar and wanted help putting it in the jar, so I took a twig and slowly pushed the remarkable caterpillar into the jar. Once it was safely inside we took it to Della's desk downstairs and gently placed it on the desk for a closer examination. While all this was going on, Della was on the computer googling a description. Almost instantaneously a picture of the caterpillar appeared on the monitor. What we had was a Hickory Horned Devil - the caterpillar of the beautiful and big Royal Moth (http://hilarynelson.com/Hobbies/Bugs/HickoryHornedDevilCaterpillar/), 
one of God's strangest-looking yet awesomely beautiful caterpillars. I took some photos (since I have a primitive, pre-digital 35 mm Nikon, I have yet to finish the roll of film and get it developed - this photo is taken from the internet). We watched it a good half-hour - it just moved slowly along - and we tried to get even more information about the caterpillar. We put it back on a tree where it remained until the next morning and the sun got warmer and then it moved higher and higher. Within a day we had lost him. But the remarkable thing about the HHD is that it will drop to an area of soft soil and bury itself for the winter, emerge as a moth in the spring, mate, the female will lay its eggs and live about a week. The Royal Moth is native to this region of the country and is found throughout the south and southwest. 

I was reminded of the spring day in Worland WY when I looked out my window and saw what I thought was a slow-moving hummingbird flitting among the flowers. I discovered it was a moth - a sphinx moth with a long proboscis for sipping the nectar of the flowers. I started paying more attention around town and saw 20-30 of them among the downtown flowers barrels. Amazing. What amazing things do you see in your backyards or on your trips this past year. In the past three months we've had two humming birds among a wide variety of birds at Della's feeders. The hummingbirds went for the petunias on the deck. We are on the lookout for other caterpillars. Kenny's third grade class last year watched an egg and larva of a monarch butterfly go through its changes in the classroom.