The Metamorphosis of Liam Thompson

 

Liam, I've been thinking about you. As you know, I love metamorphosis, watching living things grow and change and thrive. So I'll start your birthday post with the larval form. This photo was taken November 8, 1999, at around 2 in the afternoon, and we'd just gotten you home. It was your birth day. You were so precious. Your head was the size of a Delicious apple. Your hair was a bizarre satiny champagne color.

 

In this photo, you look to be about at the second instar.  Still pretty soft and grublike. Mighty cute.

 You've got some molts to go, little worm. Washington County Fair, probably September 2003.

We'll fast forward a bit to the sweet fella, who has shed into a form that's a bit more hip.

And I couldn't resist this one of you peeking to see if Daddy was really asleep in the hammock on Hog Island. If he was, he wouldn't be for long. You were an itch!

An all-time favorite, from that time I took you along to the Space Coast Birding Festival, and we had a little time just to mess around on the beach. Prolegs have lengthened. This caterpillar is maturing! 

I cannot look at this photo without laughing out loud. Lord, how you make me laugh. Still an itch!

Lots of good food, fresh air and exercise add up to a healthy late-instar unit. Running the haybales on a winter evening. I can only watch in amazement. This is not in my Hobbit repertoire, to leap at high speed from bale to bale. I'd be down in the first crevasse in a heartbeat.

Oh, my. I have been surpassed by a head or so.

Renting a tux for prom, April 6, 2017.

Ma wasn't going to let just anyone take your senior photos. She's too cheap, and 

homegrown is better.

Moving into elegant form as a college freshman on November 6, 2018. Who's that lady?

She keeps appearing. Must be someone important!

Four years later, at your June 2022 college grad party...

photo by Evan Dorsky

and a time-travel back in summer 2022...why, there's Hailey again! 

I feel like the lucky one to be able to see you through each molt.  You've emerged!

You're a Mothman now!

Liam and Hog Sphinx, July 24, 2022

Fully realized, and able to fly, now looking for a place to land.

I'm so thankful to have you here, if only for the interim**, to share this place, this cur, and these skies.

Your first magazine cover arrived via rumbly brown truck yesterday. I hadn't painted a magazine cover by the time I was 23! Oh, what a feeling, to see your work in print! May this be the first of many, many more!

And there's the full lunar eclipse from 3-6 AM, on your birthday. I am, of course, up to see it. I've gotten up to look at the moon at 12:30, 2, 3, 4... I peek out. The moon has but a tiny sliver of light; the disc is dark. You're asleep, and I'm not going to wake you.

I have been awake, enjoying the eclipse, sleeping in peaceful bits, thinking about the Metamorphosis of Liam. 23 years old!

I go to wake you. I have to. I have a coat for you in my arms. You think about it for a minute, then come with me through the dark house to the downstairs patio. Through the binoculars, the moon is a pellucid disc, not red, but more the color of sun through a squirrel's ear.

Orion blazes to the south, leaning into his battle with Taurus. Mars is hung up right between Taurus' horns.

I'm betting on Taurus for this battle; he's got Mars on his mind. The Pleiades twinkle over the moon, revealed in its darkness.

 Everything is perfectly dark but for the stars and that softly glowing disc. The night is cold, breezy. Dry leaves swish and tick in the wind. 

Whoa, coool! you say as you look through the binoculars. I'm grinning in the dark, glad you let me drag you out yet again into this abundant life.

You look again, take a deep breath of the sweet cold night, and turn back to the warm house and your  bed.

I'm glad I woke you after all. I stay out, looking. 

 A meteor streaks over. I'm still smiling about it when another meteor falls.

It has to be so dark to see the meteors any more.

The moon stays in totality for ages longer than I thought it would. Its disk gets darker and darker as it sinks behind the orchard trees. I can't see my hand in front of my face. I can't take photos; this is well above my pay grade as a photographer. It's 6:05 AM, and still dull squirrel-ear mauve. 6:18 am, and it's still a barely visible pinkish whisper in the west as dawn streak-paints the eastern sky. Who knew?

Up and down the tower stairs I go. I hope you're asleep again.

I love you, sweet, funny, brilliant, beautiful boy. I sure love living here with you. Happy birthday, and salut! 

to another swing around Ol' Sol.

 Here's to you, to the tremendous strides you've taken the last few years; to the life I know is waiting for you out there, the work that will, I trust, use your talents and bolster your confidence; a space of your own; love and travel and new places to explore on your big, still-tender wings.

**PSA: he's still looking for a position as a graphic designer. The closer to NYC, the better.  

Moving Into Blue

Oh how swiftly recent memories become ancient history, especially in fall, when everything changes so fast from hour to hour. The common milkweed that was blooming like mad on September 1 has now dropped all its yellowed leaves, and I'm nursing along the very last chrysalis of summer, which should eclose any day now. Yes, those are the Three Graces in the background (thinking about how cool it would be to make a book of my photos of those trees over the years!) I like this one!

On September 1, I was pleased to find the American dittany blooming in the gasline cut t the back of the property. It's a dainty little thing with a wonderful sharp turpentiney smell when you rub the leaves. 

It won't be long before this plant will be making another kind of flower! After the first hard frost, when the tops are killed back, the plant's root's will continue pumping water through the shattered stems, making frostflowers!

Out in the meadow, the tall coreopsis was putting on an amazing show. It came up in places where I'd never seen it before, perhaps thanks to the abundant wet summer. I love how this meadow changes year to year. This year it was off the hook spectacular.

As I write on Oct. 26, it hasn't really frozen yet, which is amazing, considering how cold it got in the second week of October. I'm going to jump in the wayback machine now to show you the Hickory Horned Devil from September 1-4. 

Changes are its gargantuan size

and a notable increase in the intensity of turquoise blue in its anterior parts.

The devil is pretty implacable at this point. I'm trying to get it to open up its "eyes" by curling its head down, but fail to make it feel threatened enough to do that. It truly is a fearsome looking but utterly harmless creature, my own personal Beast.

On Sept. 2, I measured it with my hand. That's a 6.5" caterpillar, folks!

Shila came to see and photograph the beast. It dwarfs her largeish iPhone. 

                                        

Sept. 3 saw it still eating like there was no tomorrow. Still, it didn't make an appreciable dent on the young persimmon tree. I knew how big they could get, and was a bit worried, but I never had to move the nylon netting once it was installed. I probably could have raised a bunch on that same tree without compromising the tree. 

 I had fun looking at its legs, wrapped securely around the twig. 

Sept. 4: My hand for scale. 

Gripperdoodle/potholder clamped, check!

And look at those wonderfully ooky two-toned prolegs, all wrapped around the twig! 

Sept. 4--the turquoise is blooming! And we know what that means. The bluer it gets, the closer it is to its next phase of development--walkabout! 

I couldn't get enough of this otherworldly shade, especially in contrast to the orange horns.

Neither could Liam. We visited it daily. 

I'll leave you with a video that mesmerizes me: the caterpillar, turning on a twig. Look how careful it is. See how the gripperdoodle is its best insurance against falling; how it doesn't release the orange potholders until it has a firm grip with the true legs by its head. I had been wondering where the poop chute is: it's between the gripperdoodle potholders. So it must have to release the mechanism to poop. I wish I'd seen that. 

Enjoy the amazing coordination of its many legs, the surety of its movements. I sure did. 

 

The Devil and the Titmouse: Hickory Horned Devil, End of August

This post is about feet, birds, and scary doo-dads.

Someone on Facebook (who may or may not like to sing about gnus) asked "Whatever happened to the Hickory Horned Devil?" which was her subtle way of pointing out that I hadn't posted about it in awhile. 

Life gets in the way, is all I have to say, but the Devil kept chugging along. And thank goodness I've already uploaded all my photos, so all I have to do is find time to sit down and write about them!

These photos date from Aug 28-30 when the caterpillar was busy assuming titanic proportions, despite periodic rain.

It was also producing huge frass pellets, in bulk. I shook them out of the sleeve every time I came to photograph the beast.

These are rain-swollen, but still!

Every once in awhile it's good to put your hand in the photo to show the thing's actual size.

The rarely seen frontal view of the real head and face--unassuming, caterpillary, unlike the "face" it presents to predators.

I've turned this photo right-side up, for the Alice-in-Wonderland hookah effect. HHD's spend their days hanging upside down along twigs, where they are practically impossible to see.

This, then, is the typical pose. Even though you're looking right at it, the cream and black bands along its velvety sides break up the form so you can barely see it amidst the sunlit leaves, and the countershaded pale back further flattens the form and makes it disappear. Its first and best defense is camouflage!

I am fascinated by its feet, which have Velcro-like surfaces and stick unbelievably well to branches, and to each other. There is so much to be learned from invertebrate architecture. See, this thing is so heavy and vulnerable that falling out of a tall tree could mean rupture and certain death. Not to mention giving it the uncertain job of finding the right tree to laboriously climb again...So it moves very, very slowly and makes sure it has a deathgrip with some part of its body before it makes a move. 

The hind section, shown here in closeup. It reminds me very much of a potholder. My aging brain spat out "Gripperdoodle" when I was trying to describe it, and Gripperdoodle it remained. Maybe entomologists have a better name, but probably not. Oh right. Modified anal prolegs. That thing is like a vise off the back of the big worm.

I'm not sure what the roughened pads on the three sides of the gripperdoodle are all about. Well, maybe that is keratin, to strengthen the structure. Yeah. You can't have an effective gripper if it's squishy! They feel like hard plastic, like a weatherproof car floormat.

Eatin' in the rain. Just eatin' in the rain...

The caterpillar's false face on Sept. 1. The actual head is the shiny orange beanie atop the devil's "head." I just love this view. But why be so ornate, so prongy, so freaky? 

Titmice and chickadees, that's why. They don't mind taking their food in oversized packages. I'll never forget seeing this Carolina chickadee rip into a silken cocoon in the Chute on our land and pull out a huge pupa. I don't know if my from-memory rendering of the pupa will suffice for ID (it looks pretty bad), but I suspect this would have been a luna, given that the cocoon was in a tree and not underground. It sure isn't going to be a luna moth now.

From my book,  The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds.

I will borrow here from a Facebook post by Cynthia Mullens on the Mountain State Birders page. This young tufted titmouse has found a most unfortunate imperial moth caterpillar and is pecking away at it. 

The green goo indicates that the enterprising titmouse has scored on the caterpillar and will probably end up eating it. Even if it judges the beast too big to grapple with, the caterpillar is done for. Imperial moth caterpillars are big and impressive, but they have nothing by way of defense--no stinging hairs, no pokey horns, no false eyes or scary faces.

photo by Cynthia Mullens, used by permission

The HHD has that all covered.

There's a lot of bird food in that sea-green tube, but there are also spines, and they're concentrated at the head end.

Any bird that comes at this beast from behind gets a dose of 

BLAAA BOOGA BOOGA

which is plenty enough to scare a pecking titmouse or chickadee away. Cuckoos and jays, I suspect, are unfazed by such things, or by lusty thrashing, which is why sleeving the branch was the way to go. The thing I was even more afraid of was parasitic wasps and flies, so a fine mesh sleeve just made sense any way I looked at it. It took the worry out of watching this marvelous being develop.

Knowing the HHD could hang in peace, and that it would be there the next time I came calling, meant the world to me, and gave me peace of mind.