Photo by Joan Heffernan
These leggy creatures can easily be spotted. The black swallowtail caterpillar may be munching on parsley or dill and the monarch caterpillar on milkweed.
A few weeks back, my friend and I were birding and hoofing it on the New England trail. We had our necks craned and were scanning the canopy for several of our favorite migrants, especially the scarlet tanager. We heard him and despite being ever so brightly colored he was hard to see in the tops of the oaks. A bit frustrating, but we would never breathe a negative word about these wonderful oak trees lining the trail. They are forest giants and attract and host insects , especially caterpillars which nourish so many of our birds. In fact, I have read that they support over 950 species of caterpillar, so there is a caterpillar for just about any bird. Naturally, we had to discuss our top ten list of favorite caterpillars, which soon morphed into a discussion on our favorite insects. You see, we have it all covered on the trail. By the way, I think the monarch and black swallowtail caterpillars won the top two spaces with the praying mantis coming in a close third. And just to round out our day, we turned over a few logs and saw some interesting beetles and a few larvae to make our morning complete.
Speaking of larvae, of course I had to launch into a story from my childhood. We had a pair of anole lizards which we had bought at the local pet shop. After a brief honeymoon period in their cage, we decided they would be much happier free ranging in my mother’s bow window where she kept her begonias. And they were. My mom warmed up to the idea when she saw the male display with his red dewlap and the round of push ups that he was doing for his mate. We were all impressed, perhaps more impressed than the mate.For the record, I have always found that a set of old fashioned pushups can really be the language of love. So back to the pair of anole lizards that lived in the bow window, they loved their days in the sun and retreated onto the chintz drapes in the evenings and on cooler days . I do remember my mom’s more reptile averse friends feeling a bit squeamish when they sat near the window and viewed the lizards crawling around. But that only fueled our enthusiasm. We had my dad in on the lizards, and he would bring home meal worms from the pet shop in Hartford to feed them each week.
Meal worms look like caterpillars with a hard coat and are actually a beetle larva. I am sure he got sick of his weekly stop on his way home from work,and he was not born yesterday so he found a way to order 1000 meal worms and get them delivered in the mail. And this was before the idea of Amazon was hatched. They arrived at the post office on Easter weekend so they had to sit until Monday for pick up. However , the package had been roughed up on route and there was a large tear in the bag allowing the mealworms to have free range in the post office for the weekend. Needless to say the postmaster was not happy with us come Monday, and for weeks my mom crossed the state line to Massachusetts to buy stamps as to not face their wrath. Eventually my mom wormed her way back into the good graces of the postal workers using a banana bread loaf or two as a bribe and they agreed to let bygones be bygones.