At first, it was scared and kind of wadded up:
But it slowly started coming around:
*where the hell am I?*
*is that dog gone?*
*whew! Thank God that stupid dog is gone!*
Check it out...it had 4 little red knobs sticking up on its head, and 1 little yellow knob sticking up on its rear end!:
It also had a 'smiley face' on its rear end, but I forgot to take a picture of it. You can see its 'smiley face butt' near the end of the video below, though.
I don't know what this big weird caterpillar will turn into. I tried googling it for a little while, but didn't come up with anything definitive. My guess is that it'll probably turn into one of those great big moths that beat themselves against your windows at night because they're attracted to your light. Who knows?
I became a little enamored of it and mesmerized by it, and videoed it crawling around. I had given it a gentle little shower with the garden hose to wash the dirt and junk off of it where Maddie had been messing with it. I was surprised that it wasn't injured at all. It's obviously tougher than it seems like it would be. Kinda gross, but kinda cute all at the same time! :D
Speaking of discovering critters around the house and attempting to identify them, several weeks ago, I noticed that there was a cute little bird nest on a plank up under the tarp roof of our little paddleboat dock. At first, I didn't know if it was an old nest from last year, but it did appear to look pretty new. I told Jamie about it, and he was able to do a pull-up on the plank so he could get a closer look, and he saw that the nest has 2 cute little pink eggs in it! He lifted Lilly up so she could catch a glimpse too. At that point, I knew that we needed to steer clear of the nest since it was obviously active, and I wouldn't want for our eagerness to freak out the mommy bird and make her think it wasn't a safe place to hatch her babies, and cause her to abandon the nest. So we've kept our distance from the nest, but over the past few weeks we've gotten close enough to it just a few times to see the mommy bird sitting on the eggs, and the mommy and daddy birds flying around it. I don't know if the eggs have hatched yet. I haven't been down there in a few days or heard the tell-tale baby bird 'cheeping' noises yet. Maybe tomorrow I will go down there to check and see how they're doing. It does make me a little bit nervous, though, because the nest is located at the dock, which would make it relatively easy for newly-fledged baby birds to clunk down into the lake and drown! I sure hope that doesn't happen!
Anyway, we've seen the parent birds, but I don't know what kind of birds they are. The male and female both seem to look the same. They don't really have any distinguishing features at all like stripes or spots or vibrant colors or anything. They're just kind of dull-colored; light grayish and brownish. Their tails are kind of long, though. Not super-long, but definitely not short. That's about all I can tell about them. I did think that their nest was pretty clever, because you could see that they had basically glued it on to the wooden plank that they built it on with mud, so when the mud dried, it was stuck there like concrete!
Like always, I tried googling to see if I could identify the birds. As I was poking around (and not having any luck), I just so happened to run across a Robin. But what really caught my eye was its scientific name. At first, I thought it had to be some kind of joke. Take a look:
Really? Turdus? You've gotta be kidding me. Believe it or not, that really is its actual scientific name. Sheesh.
LOL!
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