Woolly Worms
If you are already feel thoroughly familiar with everything woolly, then skip to the bottom for a photo quiz of some other fuzzy beauties. The brown and black woollies are not hard to find these days—you have to swerve to miss them as they book it across the roads in search of food, especially dandelion greens, violets and plantain. Yesterday, on a fifteen minute walk, I picked up and ushered five of the larvae to the other side of the road.
I like what these caterpillars represent to me: wriggling bundles of latent potential, patiently preparing for transformation. Preparing by putting on their fuzzy winter coats. I’m blissfully ignorant about these larvae’s fuzz, which is why I can so readily anthropomorphize about their winter coats. I have no idea why they are fuzzy. But I am not making up the transformation in their futures. Like the calm before the storm, they head into the calm slumber of winter, to curl into themselves, percolate, spin cocoons and eventually emerge in April as a seemingly whole new being: the Isabella Tiger Moth. Perhaps that is what winter is for— to pull into oneself, percolate and transform towards a lighter, airborne being?
Well, here’s the quiz: Can any of you supply some info about the identities and hidden potentials of these other three fuzzies?
