Cimbex americana

There goes Ray. Ray is pulling his cart along when suddenly Ray espies an apparent caterpillar hustling along the cart path. But it’s not one of the hairy caterpillars. No. Those hairy caterpillars are everywhere. But what they like to do is jump out of the hackberry trees on to Ray. Then they crawl under Ray’s overall bib or down the neck of his shirt. Goddess damn it! No. This is a bald caterpillar type.

The procedure is, when Ray finds an interesting vermin at work, that vermin is captured, stuck in an inflated plastic sack, brought to the CB, identified, photographed and released. If it can’t be identified, Ray takes it back to work.

In this case, we were able to identify the vermin and establish that we have some habitat for it at the CB. Here it is going along on the CB basswood (Tilia americana).

Man alive and boy howdy! It’s a shock to the system having this picture in the Hymenoptera folder. At first we thought it was a baby skipper.