Year of The Caterpillar

This has certainly been the year of the caterpillar. I had more this year than any year I can remember. It certainly makes me wonder what causes over abundances of certain critters in certain years. While some years we have so many frogs of different varieties in the ponds that the evenings are deafening, this year we hardly had any. I must say I would rather have noisy evenings than caterpillars though. While they may turn into beautiful butterflies and moths, they can sure do some damage to the garden.



Tomatoes in the garden? Yep, you'll have these.

I don't know if there are little bitty Horn Worm Caterpillars or not but I had a bunch of tiny ones as well.
I much prefer the woolly ones as they are just more fun to play with.
They were on the Tall Rosen Weed.

They ate the Cleome.
They were on the Granite Gaura.

They even ate a lot of the Blue Bonnets. I didn't think anything would eat a Blue Bonnet.
Around the Welding shop was a type of horn worm that I haven't seen before. They were all similar but different as well.



And then there is the woolly bears. I think every one has these. But all summer long? I'm still seeing these around the garden and we've already had several light frosts.

My friend, Tom Nash, had caterpillars around his house by the thousands and they were not like any that I had. They were only feeding on one type of weed in his yard and really didn't bother any thing.

While most of the caterpillar species we have seen were in major abundance we only spotted one of each of these two varieties. This one looks like a south Austin artist painted it.

This one was on a lily pad in one of the ponds. And yes, it was eating it. The brilliant chartreuse color was absolutely stunning.

The side view revealed other colors I couldn't see from above. This was truly a stunning example of natures art work.


While they can be a pain in the butt to deal with sometimes, they are still a beautiful part of nature even before the beauty they eventually become.