how in the world did my camera accidentally manage to get that in focus?
Let us read now from the book of Sagan:
He had coaxed an exquisite blue caterpillar to climb aboard a twig. It briskly padded along, its iridescent body rippling with the motion of fourteen pairs of feet. At the end of the twig, it held on with its last five [sic] segments and flailed the air in a plucky attempt to find a new perch. Unsuccessful, it turned itself around smartly and retraced its many steps. Der Heer then changed his clutch on the twig so that when the caterpillar returned to its starting point, there was again nowhere to go. Like some caged mammalian carnivore, it paced back and forth many times, but in the last few passages, it seemed to her, with increasing resignation. She was beginning to feel pity for the poor creature, even if he proved to be, say, the larva responsible for the barley blight.
"What a wonderful program in this little guy's head!" he exclaimed. "It works every time--optimum escape software. And he knows not to fall off. I mean the twig is effectively suspended in air. The caterpillar never experiences that in nature, because the twig is always connected to something. Ellie, did you ever wonder what that program would feel like if it was in your head? I mean, would it just seem obvious to you what you had to do when you came to the end of the twig? Would you have the impression you were thinking it through? Would you wonder how you knew to shake your front ten feet in the air but hold on tight with the other eighteen?"
Was washed up by the waves. Seemed to become active after being removed from the cold water. Sad thing is that caterpillars generally need specific host plants, and I don't recognize this one, so didn't know where to place it.
This series of six on twinberry -- which cannot be mistaken for anything else right now -- but still I can't find out what type of caterpillars these are. The two-yrs-ago salal pictures I later thought looked a little like swallowtail caterpillars in general, but I picked one of these up that I'd accidentally knocked to the ground, and it didn't have any horns to evert, or not that I noticed, anyway.
Mid-April. It's chewing on the tough beach grass, which, were I a larva, would be about my last choice of nutriment. It's tough stuff, and pointy, I might add. I find insects on occasion who had been flying heedlessly on windy days and became impaled.
Aside: this is about the third time ever when I've had to to use manual focus and actually got something non-horrible. Estimating distances is hard. But bright day, good depth of field, I guess.
