Encounter with a sphinx
A recent Monday at work got off to a terrific start when I scaled the stairs to the roof so I could have a smoke while proofreading pages and the creature above was there to say hello. He was crawling across the wooden slats of the upper deck. I used one of my pages to scoop him onto the wooden slats of a picnic table instead so I could have a better look.
It’s a good thing I used a page instead of my fingers. As I discovered later while finding out what the hell it was, this caterpillar squirts toxins when molested.
I didn’t molest him for long. In fact I placed him gently on a shrub. When I returned to the roof with another batch of pages about an hour later, of course, he was back on the slats making a wormline for … somewhere. A subsequent visit found him gone altogether, either tucked away turning into a pupa or snatched up by a bird.
This is the caterpillar of the Oleander Sphinx moth — Daphnis nerii — a hawk-moth found from southern Europe to the subtropics of Africa and Asia.
I didn’t have a camera, so I’ve purloined these photos from the ThaiPulse Blog and ThaiBugs.com. See the rest.
