YIKES

It's not often my wife gets real excited about things she finds in nature. But this time was different. She came in the house rather frantic imploring me to come outside. Naturally, I get pretty squeamish about spiders so my first thought was that she had found this huge spider, and with little sensitivity, wanted me to see it! But that was not the case at all.

When I looked up in the tree, I spotted what caused her small bout of hysteria. It was this...



Over the past couple of days we have found little droppings that looked like small pieces of charcoal on our deck and along the ground beside the deck. Of course we had no idea what was causing it - but know we had a pretty good idea!

Apparently this is something called Citheronia regalis
(si-ther-OH-nee-uh mm REE-gahl-is) and it pupates in the ground after feeding on the leaves of the tree.

It can grow to 7" in length and ours was every bit of that!

I'm just thankful I was not sitting under it when it decided to drop to ground!

Alice took it over to one of our neighbors to see if they knew what it was. Their oldest daughter is into bugs and that sort of thing, so her mom looked it up in a bug book and determined it was some type of moth before it did it's moth thing. So we left it with them and they put it in a "cage" until their daughter got home. I sure hope it doesn't get loose!