Caterpillars of the Community

Speaking of darkness and sunrises. Once upon an early '25 autumn, the wolfman rose before crack of dawn and drove out to Nature, which in this case took the form of a field of tall grass just past the tree line. The air was cold, utterly quiet, still. Gradually I began spotting a lump on a plant here and there. And more. And more. Turns out many caterpillar species pick that time of year to fatten themselves up before hibernation.

The grassland was absolutely crawling with them, to the point I had to watch my step on the path not to muddy my shoes with their guts. The most obvious, by far, were banded wooly bears, a.k.a. Pyrrharctia isabella, a common sight in North America.

Always comical. 

Lacking experience with larvapidopterans, my website-derived identification may be off, but I think the solid orange ones are Virginian tiger moths. 

There was also a more sparsely-haired, graying variety which I'm having a devil of a time distinguishing due to its indistinctiveness.

It's not a dagger moth or a tussock moth, lacking the appropriate appendages. Closest I can get is the dogbane tiger moth Cycnia tenera (You may notice these all fall into the tiger moth subfamily.)

 

While the hairy ones were more obvious, there was also... whatever this is.

Honestly I could not identify it. Some type of cutworm? But the head and stripes don't match anything. Then I realized I may be looking in the wrong order. Sawflies are wasp relatives whose larvae look a lot like lepidopterans' -

elm sawfly larva from a different walk

- but the distinguishing characteristics (pseudopod number, gripping surface) are not all visible from my photo's angle. I expected the intermittent back markings to be more distinctive, but can't match those to anything.

 

But my favorite was the one that looks like it got an amateur haircut from an eight-year-old.

They were quite numerous, second only to the banded wooly bears. 

And they're further proof that nature has a bad, warty sense of humor.

Apparently it's a salt marsh moth. I just call it ugly. You ugleh!

 

I was able to photograph these in a span of ten meters, sitting still before the dawn chill abated, having arrived just before the sun broke over the treetops to warm them. The little patch of prairie, so silent I could hear nothing but my own breath and footsteps, gave way to a slight rustle of a breeze as temperature gradients shifted. A few birds gave a few tentative chirps over the next minutes. Gradually, noise pollution grew more like a slight pressure than discernible sound. A million tiny bodies were beginning to shift among the grass all about me. Then, hesitantly, after a few more minutes of sun, the humming, buzzing, chittering and cricketing of a busy field amped up to its familiar warm season volume, accompanied by more heartfelt birdsong.

 

Ahh.

 

Life.