I was sifting through some old photos looking for one that fit the bill for a weekly challenge, but that hadn’t been processed yet. The topic was “green animals” and I seemed to have nothing around home to photograph that was green and qualified as an animal.
Then I remembered taking some photos of the many (many, many, many) inch worms (Hemlock looper caterpillars) before they all turned into moths and the “mothpocalypse” began…..which we are fully into again now, for the fourth year in a row.
It’s like a scene out of some movie when one walks out the front door…a cloud of moths explodes around you. Back out of the driveway and they seem to come from everywhere all at once…fluttering around until they find a spot to settle again.
The caterpillars are annoying because they hang from the trees and bushes from long strands of silk and walking the trails involves dodging them, wearing them, and wiping silk fibres from your face constantly.
The moths are annoying because they slip in through cracked windows and flatten themselves against the ceiling, high on walls, and in the tops of windows where we can’t reach them…and then when the day dims to evening and we settle onto the couch and turn on the tv, they are attracted to the light and start to fly around the house.
They aren’t harmful to anything around home, but they have been pretty hard on the hemlock trees in the surrounding woods, particularly in a series of dry summers that have created added stress on the forests.
Interesting animals.
