A Hackberry Emperor Caterpillar Hogs Packing Peanut

In these parts, hackberry emperors are plenty common. But an average amateur entomologist may never know how common unless that duda (a Druid term indicating the twain usual humanoid sexes) sets up a banana feeder. Once you give them bananas, they swarm down out of the trees like crazy.

All that is true, but what about the caterpillars. We have never had a caterpillar of the hackberry emperor persuasion come to the feeder. No. Nor has anyone here ever espied one of the particular kind of caterpillars we are now discussing. That is, until Ray found one at work day before yesterday.

Where Ray works, there are even more hackberry emperors than there are at the CB. So Ray has, for decades, been on the lookout for hackberry emperor caterpillars at work. At last, after a long and hard search that spanned decades, Ray finally espied one of these elusive caterpillars.

However, Ray could not get any pictures of this caterpillar in its natural state or life-like haunts. So here it is posed on a packing peanut. After having its picture took, Ray restored this caterpillar to the work bench, knowing it would crawl to the underside of the work bench and resume whatever activity it had been performing before Ray espied it and put it on the packing peanut.