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!

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