Caterpillars

Just a note- My blog will look different today because I had to compose it using Google Blogger. I normally use Windows Live Writer because it's a lot more convenient and has more options, but Live Writer went fubar over night and will not publish to my blog. It sees the blog and will let me access it, just refuses to publish, claiming the server can't be located.

With all the rain we’ve had this spring, we were expecting a lot of mosquitoes. What we didn’t expect were the gazillions of caterpillars that are crawling all over the place. We have a few green caterpillars, and a couple of inch worms, but the majority of the critters look more-or-less like the one above. We have a lot that look like that, and they seem to come in two distinct sizes – those just over an inch and a half long, and those that are much smaller, measuring about 3/4 of an inch. They look alike, but they all seem to be one size or the other with nothing in between, so I’m not totally sure they are the same species. An on-line search identifies them as the larvae of the Tussock Moth -

That makes sense since Tussock Moths make their home in oak trees, their coloration blends with the bark, and their primary diet is oak leaves. That doesn’t explain why we have so darn many of them this year.