Many of the caterpillars of our fields are striking in their form and color. This one could easily be seen some distance off and might to birds and others of its enemies be what the skunk is to its enemy the dog—a thing to shun.
In the luxuriance of its “plumage” it, in some respects, reminds one of those fantastic forms of fowls produced by close line breeding, the Hudans, for example, or the long-tailed roosters of Japan.
Few creatures that we have photographed have been more beautiful than this black and white larva with its hairs in graceful tufts all over its body. What it eats or what its other self is like, I have not yet been able to find out.
AN UNKNOWN CATERPILLAR
Creatures like this, when they come walking down a garden path, are so striking and so gracefully weird that one would think their forms deserving of more study than they get. There is a reason for this, though, that is not hard to find; they are such transient creatures. A few days in the egg, a week or two as caterpillars, and they pass into their cocoons to emerge as moths or butterflies, and of the two weeks when they are caterpillars, the first part of the time they are too small to make much impression upon us.
Then too, you cannot collect and keep them as you can the butterflies or beetles, in fact this strange horned beast is still unnamed because its carcass shriveled and faded until it bore so little resemblance to its living self that it could not be identified. It is quite unlike the hickory borer or horned devil, being dark red-brown in color. It takes a skilled taxidermist entomologist to squeeze them out, blow up the skin and mount them in a case, and that is the only way to keep these forms, unless we have found another way in these photographs of them.