K called me from the porch, “Mom! Come see this moth that looks like a leaf!”
I should have put something in here for scale, it was as wide as my hand is long.
The color and size reminded me of the descriptions of a Luna Moth I’d read in “A Girl of the Limberlost,” and “The Four Story Mistake”, but I seemed to remember a swallowtail.
Wikipedia to the rescue, it was a luna alright, one that probably lost it’s false eyes and fast tail as a sacrificial bite to a bat.
Apparently the further south you live, the more likely you are to see them, because they have more generations a year, but here it’s only 1 a year, and they spend week a year as adults.
And they don’t eat or drink when they have wings, because they have no mouths, they are just around to make more eggs – Which was a little more than I wanted to know about the insect, but I’m glad I got to see one in person.
And I found out that K hasn’t read the Melendy books yet, so I have a nice reading project to work on with her once we are done with the Number Devil. Matt has been enjoying either Lord Peter Whimsey short stories (I think I’ve run out of the ones that aren’t oger-ish) or essays as he washes dishes, Dorothy Sayers is just fun to read out loud.