Visit from a Sphinx Moth

All the pet rescue stories are weighing on me, so I’m taking a brief intermission from them for moth talk.  I was out in the yard trimming back the palm trees and I decided to completely cut down a Lady Bank’s rose bush which keeps getting tangled in the palms (and which always tries to trip me when I have to check on the pool equipment).  I chopped off all the branches at ground-level and tossed them aside into a pile, and then I saw a moth on the wall.  Not just any old moth, but a gigantic moth, which I assume is a type of sphinx moth.  Here’s a photo of him in relation to my hand, so you can see how large he really is:

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He climbed into my hand and let me carry him into the front yard, where I stuck him on a rock to take his photo.  I gently lifted back his wings to see if there was any colour underneath, and lo and behold, orange!

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Then he just got annoyed with me and flew away into the landscaped neighbourhood “common area” across the road.  I feel better with him over there than in our yard, as we have an exterminator who sprays the outside nooks and crannies and I’d hate to think I’d killed anything other than cockroaches and black widow spiders.  Unfortunately we saw our first black widow of the season last week, and it was right outside on the back porch, at ground level, just waiting to bite a dog who brushed by it.  I honestly feel a lot of guilt about the exterminator, and if I catch something inside, like a spider or cricket, I just carry it outside and try to release it into a “safe” area.  We had the one year where we had quite a few scorpions, though, and between those and the black widows and the disgusting roaches, I don’t know how else to keep the bug population in check.  Perhaps we’ll do some more landscaping and I’ll import some lizards to take care of the job for me.  Oh, we had one other interesting insect adventure recently:  there was a headless praying mantis outside the back door.  All this time, I thought the “head biting off after mating” thing was just a myth.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 09/13 at 08:56 PM

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