Throwback Thursday: Remember That Hickory Horned Devil?

I knew it would be a mistake not to write about these photos when I uploaded them. September being what it is, I never found the time. My good readers will recall that much of the summer of 2022 was spent fussing over one enormous worm, protected by a fine mesh sleeve on my open-grown persimmon tree: the HICKORY HORNED DEVIL!! 

I think everybody overloaded on HH Devil last summer, so it's really fun to go back and see them now, when these huge caterpillars aren't even a gleam in their parents' compound eyes. 

Let's shoot back to September, when the orange-striped oakworms were defoliating my beloved little mailbox oak. (They're not gonna do that again! It was TOTAL.)

And I discovered brown-eyed Susans Rudbeckia triloba--blooming long after the classic black-eyed Susan, Rudbeckia hirta, is done--on a roadside bank--Lawd, how beautiful!

and the Conoclinium coelestinum (Mistflower, wild ageratum) was in full bloom in the orchard.

There's about 3x as much this year, thanks to intelligent mowing! I absolutely adore this spreading native perennial. It can just spread all over the clearing at the orchard's end, as far as I'm concerned. Butterflies and bees love it, and so do I. 

It was September 2, and I found the first wild persimmon on the ground, and it was sweet and edible!

Something not sweet nor edible: the gargantuan frass (poop) of a Very Large Caterpillar.

By Sept. 3, it was very, very  big, as big as it was going to get. 

Click on the photo to enjoy its black silk stockings, and the way the claspers wrap around the twig. 

It feels like a cool, velvety hotdog to hold. 

Sept. 3, Shila came out to photograph this wonder. Don't miss the worm...it's right in front of her phone lens, hanging upside down. Huge. YOOOOGE.

I can't span it with my hand. It's 6 3/4" long. 

The worm had become so used to being photographed and moved this way and that, that I had trouble getting it to show me its Ray-Bans any more. 

I literally had to tickle the tubular being into displaying its terrifying false eyes.

More stockings...the caterpillar clings like its life depends on it, and indeed it does. Being so huge and heavy, a fall from high in a tree would spell death; it'd split like a ripe melon. 

We aren't going to let it fall. It's cushioned in its parasitic wasp-proof mesh sleeve, anyway. 

And the custodian comes every few days to empty out handfuls of its frass to keep things 

nice and clean. 

Absolutely fantastic blue. I have a Specialized bike helmet exactly this color. 

Yes, we'd become very fond of our terrifying but utterly harmless Devil, 

and I don't think it minded us one bit. 

Changes soon to come for this creature! I've saved these last few posts from September and October 2022 until I knew what would become of our colorful, horned friend. Stay tuned...

Hickory Horned Devil: Shedding Into Beauty

 When we left the Hickory Horned Devil, it was preparing to molt, hanging limp, then pulsing and extending its front half. I was in a tizzy because I had to take Curtis to the vet to get his staples out after surgery, and I couldn't be there for its last molt as a caterpillar. Dang it! Priorities. I did, however, get to come home that afternoon to a changed beast.

No, not Curtis. The worm. Well, Curtis was happy without the staples in his neck and brisket. 

Aug 24 4:43pm LOOK WHAT IT DID

Morning August 26. Hoooo Weeee!!

I was SO excited to see the transformation. All my worry about the anorexia and dull coloration dissipates as I see what the caterpillar was working up to. It didn't eat for 2 1/2 days while it was preparing to molt, and that coincided with my taking it inside, so of course I concluded that I'd done something dumb and ruined everything. That's how it goes, every time, for the first-time helicopter HHD mom. 

I'm an HHHD mom.

26 August 2022. In this video I'm showing you how the "devil eyes" work. The caterpillar really only displays them under duress, when it's frightened and thinks it needs to scare someone back. They're just square black spots on the caterpillar's nape, or thorax I guess. And the worm can sort of flex to display them when necessary, by tucking its head down against its underside. That move expands the nape, reveals the Ray Bans, and also deploys the scary horns, which don't

hurt at all, and have no poison in them. All for show. 

Here's the new sleeve I deployed on 26 August. I ordered it from raisingbutterflies.org

It's the biggest one they make, a habitat fit for the King of Caterpillars, the Regal Moth's larva.

It's so big that I never had to move the caterpillar for its whole time inside. With smaller sleeves, you have to move them to a fresh branch when the worm eats all the leaves inside. You want to shake the branch you're about to enclose quite hard before you sleeve it, to make sure you've got all the stinkbugs and spiders off it. Then you run the sleeve over the branch and tie it very tightly and securely at both ends. You can't tie it too tightly, or run the cord around the closure too many times. Things get in. Things get out, otherwise.

The beauty of the sleeve is that the caterpillar is outdoors, exposed to sun, rain, wind and changing temperatures, just as it would be in nature. For monarchs, at least, this is VITAL to their picking up navigational skills. Shockingly, monarchs raised inside a house don't know how to get to Mexico, apparently. What a thought--that in trying to help them we could be hampering them, keeping them from fulfilling their destiny. So you've got to raise them outdoors, and sleeves are the way to go. 

The only difference in sleeve raising and wild life, for the caterpillar, is that nothing can kill it.

I loved all the stages of the HHD, but I have to say I found this newly shed fifth instar caterpillar the most beautiful of all. I loved its proportions--still with ridiculously long horns and prolegs; gorgeous shades of beige and brown, set off by all that orange red bling. 

Aug 25 7 pm New 5th Instar Molt coloration--maybe my favorite! He finally started eating again that evening. Whew!! Had not eaten since I took him in on the 23rd! I was worried. But it was just him getting ready to molt. I have to say the worry was worth it.

26 August 11 AM, I got a good shot of the gripperdoodle off the back of the worm. It's basically constructed like an oven mitt with Velcro tips. It clamps onto the branch like a vise, and that worm is NOT going to fall while the gripperdoodle is engaged. Yes that is a Zick neologism and yes you may use it. As I age and am unable to come up with the words I want, I spontaneously invent them. Often they're better than the word I was searching for; just ask my kids.  Kind of a natural history Casey Stengel at this stage of my life.

The correct term for the gripperdoodle would be  "modified anal prolegs" but what fun is that? And also gross. Come to think of it I wish I'd figured out where the frass comes out. Inside/behind the gripperdoodle? Does it have to release the oven mitt to take a sh-t? Darn! Wish I'd poked around to better understand this remarkable naughty bit.

By 26 August, 7:20 pm, the caterpillar was turning pale before my eyes, especially along the dorsum. 

26 aug 720 pm

In the sunlight, I could see some green creeping into the bronzy brown it had before.

There's a Curtis bomb in this photo. Not an accident. He tries to get in the frame just like Chet did.

And wait--is that turquoise coming into the foreparts?? Is this thing changing color before my eyes, like an octopus? Why not? In the Devil World, anything is possible. 

You're just too good to be true

Can't take my eyes off of you

You'd be like heaven to touch

I want to hold you so much

Well, that last part, not so much.

Hickory Horned Devil!

All photos in this post by Bill of the Birds.

Bill of the Birds was off to one side, peering up into the pawpaw branchtes, looking for fruit. Suddenly he hollered, three words, three times in a row, at the top of his considerable lungs. It sounded like this:

HICKORYHORNEDDEVIL!!HICKORYHORNEDDEVIL!!
HICKORYHORNEDDEVIL!!

We peered up where he was pointing and saw something that looked like a thorny hot dog hanging, backlit...how he ever saw it much less identified it in a nanosecond, I still don't know.

When he had composed himself, he held the camera up closer, and the little Canon G-11 did its very best in a difficult light regime. And that best is real darn good.

By this time, the caterpillar--for a hickory horned devil is a caterpillar, though it looks more like the hero of a planet-destroying Japanese horror flick--had composed itself into its most fearsome persona, compressing and drawing itself up into a sigmoid shape. It drew all its kabuki spines and swords--schwinnng! and made itself ready for whatever terrifying battle it might have to fight.

Dig those crazy black eyespots! Devil, indeed! I can't get over them, nor its enormous, leg-like claspers. (The caterpillar's real head is the little orange unit above the fearsome black eyespots). It was making short work of the hickory's leaves, eating each leaflet entirely before moving onto the next, then presumably backing up the petiole to go destroy another.

This is the larva of the royal walnut moth, or regal moth, as it's sometimes called. Latin: Citheronia regalis. We'd found it in its last growth instar, when it turns from brown to green.

We'd found it on a hickory tree, but they're also found on ash, butternut, cherry, lilac(!!), pecan, persimmon, sumac, sweet gum, sycamore, walnut, and other trees, according to David L. Wagner's WONDERFUL Caterpillars of Eastern North America.
This is a book you simply must have on your shelf. It changed my life.


Grab a Bic or a Flair pen off your desk. That's how long this monster is. And it's as big around as Winston Churchill's fattest stogie. You'd have to use two hands to contain it. And, despite its fearsome appearance, you'd come out unscathed.

For the Hickory Horned Devil is harmless: not poisonous, not even itchy. All he's got to defend himself is

BOOGABOOGABOOGA!

You've got to figure he's delicious, or why would he be so thoroughly frightening?

So we photographed him in situ--Bill of the Birds holding the Canon G-11 waay up over his head while I held the end of the branch down enough to get our frightened quarry in range. But for Bill's long arms, we'd have not much to show for our first-ever encounter with the most coveted caterpillar in North America--on our pawpaw hunting grounds, on our land, no less! Not long from now, he'll climb down to the ground, wander about for awhile, and dig in and pupate underground in a silk-lined earthen cell, resting for the winter like an enormous brown seed before emerging next year as a glorious royal walnut moth.

From Wikipedia. Wish it were mine! This huge moth more than covers your hand. This is a very fresh one, probably still drying its soft, limp wings after emerging from the pupal case.

Being a Science Chimp, I didn't get very far down the trail before I smacked my forehead and said, "I've got to go back and find some horned devil frass!" I'd read that one way to find devils is to see their poop and then look up--a neat trick in deep leaf litter, but still...most of us look down in the woods, and I'm likely to spot something like that someday. I wanted to find the poop so I'd know it the next time I saw it. Now Bill of the Birds--he's always lookin' up.

So I went right back under that horned devil and got down on all fours and muttered and rummaged around for a long time while my family kind of chuckled and rolled their eyes and darned if I didn't find me a very nice bit of fresh devilpoop, a little grenade of compressed used up hickory chaw. It was big enough to completely cover my wedding ring which I can assure you after 17 years is still in situ.

As if the pawpaws weren't enough, I had fresh devilpoop. I think the pawpaw/devilhunt was the best expotition we had all summer. That's nature at its top-of-lungs hollerin' best.

And it's all FREE.

BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!

All photos in this post by Bill of the Birds