Beautiful critter

Once again, my open window policy has paid off. This curiously patterned moth has been hanging about in my kitchen, where the portable air conditioner requires an open, unscreened window. I'm sure the critter showed up to enjoy the bright lights of Chez GrannyJ.

I had not realized how showy this insect was until it opened its wings. Wow! Time for pictures. After flying about, said moth landed on my left hand, while I somehow managed to get the camera operational with my right. Oops, wings closed. One picture, then two and three. I had to poke at the critter to get it to display its spectacular set of R.E.D. rear wings for this view.

As well as the red and black abdomen. Q: do all moths have those lovely silky hairs where wings meet abdomen? Below, a close up view of the pattern on the wing. Note how the grey color is achieved by alternating lines of black and white scales. Very much like old fashioned newspaper half-tones.

For the record, this particular moth is called the painted tiger moth or, officially, arachnis picta. Why arachnis, which sounds pretty spidery to me, I don't know. Googling, I found physical specs for the critter and plenty of pictures, but nothing about how it makes a living. However, one insect collector in American Fork Canyon, Utah, had posted a splendid series of 12 life-cycle pictures. Starting with a female who laid 400 eggs in the first week of September, subsequent pix followed the caterpillar and pupa stages on to emergence of a new generation of arachnis. Great stuff!

Links for the End of August: The site where I found those pix was most interesting: Insect Net, a network for insect collectors (which means primarily butterflies and beetles, of course.) Forums, photo galleries & videos, news, shopping -- all in one place. While in the realm of nature, a picture from NASA of a curious cloud formation down under in Queensland -- they are called morning glory clouds, though they look more like rolled up crepes. Closer to home, I found a set of Flickr photos of our Citizens Cemetery.

Munch. Munch. Munch. Munch. Munch. Munch.

We had a good rain this afternoon, the first in about five days. Sadly, good rain always brings out more herbivores, such as this snail. These pesky creatures are also the first plant munchers of the season, in great numbers.


They adore hollyhock leaves -- among other tasty goodies from the garden. As a result, I've had to start my hollyhocks indoors in pots; young plants in the ground are decimated by snails and their peers, the slugs.


Here's a better picture of one of today's snails. (I've finally discovered how to do close-in shots with my little Sony.)


The critter above is the guilty party for the munched out hollyhock leaf, to be perfectly honest. (I had that particular plant in a container on the porch, safe from snails.) The several kinds of grasshopper emerge later in the season than the snails; this fellow has neatly striped legs, if you look carefully. By the way, I don't spray any of the critters because I have a dear cat (DC) that wanders the yard.


Besides, I got caught up in the behavior of a batch of woolly bears that discovered my Martha Stewart milkweed (the Peruvian variety.) A batch of these fuzzy caterpillars appeared of a sudden and began munching out on this single plant.


One morning was overcast and cooler; the critters were huddled together, to keep warm, possibly.


Here they have nearly denuded the milkweed stem.


Yesterday they abandoned the now leafless milkweed and spread out, hunting for more food.


And guess what -- though I hadn't realized it, there was another, smaller milkweed a good six to eight feet away in another large pot. But those woolly bears found it and started gathering again this afternoon.

Of course, it was time to consult The Google, to see what I could learn about woolly bears with such finicky eating habits. Took some drilling down, but I found out that they are tiger moth larvae -- in particular, a variety of (surprise) milkweed moth.

With 21 species of tiger moth reported in Yavapai County, we have just one kind of milkweed moth (Euchaetes antica). The picture of the Oklahoma variety sure bears a family resemblence to my crop.

Don't ask me what I'm going to do next. Maybe get rid of the woolly guys and save my #2 milkweed...maybe keep watching them to see what they do next. I have to decide tomorrow.

Next Day: At 9 a.m. I went downstairs to pick up the papers. #2 milkweed stripped bare -- and woolly bears nowhere to be seen. I suppose they have scattered, looking for yet another milkweed. And I have only one -- located a good 30 feet away, in the ground, as opposed to my garden of pots. When I took a quick glance, some had already found it.

Also I noted on the skeleton of the original plant that the little black dots I had seen earlier were now more the size of rain drops and developing the same sorts of bristles as my earlier crop!