The boys love to go 'caterpillar hunting' and were quite thrilled to find their first caterpillar of the season. We examined his colors (black with white stripe down its back and blue stripes down the sides) before D picked him up to feel how "soft" it was.... the fuzzier the better in his opinion. This caterpillar met his approval. He anxiously told me to take pictures so that we could look it up later to see what kind it was. When I came back outside with my camera, they had found a few more fuzzy friends, and D was letting them crawl up his sleeves (boys will be boys, right?). That night we looked up caterpillars in The Gardener's Bug Book by Cynthia Westcott (an old book I found at our library book sale for twenty cents!!) and found out our little visitors are Eastern Tent Caterpillars. They form communal "tents" in the nooks of twigs until they are ready to morph into moths (reddish brown with two diagonal stripes on each wing). It was fun to search in this book because there aren't a lot of pictures so D and I had to read through all of the caterpillar entries in order to find the one that best fit our observations (a.k.a. cuddle time on the couch). We then confirmed our findings in my Audobon guide. The next day we found their nest right near the end of our driveway. The boys have been checking back every day to watch them crawling in, out, and all about their nest, and today B found a teeny little baby one crawling on a branch nearby. The next thing we're bound to notice is all the holes in the foliage as they eat their way through our trees. I guess we'll have to reread "The Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle tomorrow night (again.........).
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