Okay, here are a few photos of wildlife — the tiny variety.

oleander

Last week Kristy and I were lounging on some sun chairs in Florida. Yes, with apologies to our friends up north, it was sunny enough for sunbathing. (This obviously was before Hurricane Ida came to town.)

Anyway, behind our sun chairs was a row of unremarkable landscaping shrubbery – a group of leafy green bushes with long branches. I wasn’t paying these bushes any attention, even though some of the branches extended right above my chair.

Kristy glanced in my direction.

“Ummmmm…. What are those things?” she asked.

“Things?” I replied. “What things?”

“Those little furry things … crawling right above your head?”

I glanced up at a shrubbery branch that was indeed hanging a few inches above my head. Upon it were crawling a bevy of miniature space aliens.

Okay, they weren’t space aliens — they were oleander caterpillars.

These caterpillars are a ravenous lot, famed for their voracious appetite. Just ask some of these bushes, which were almost stripped bare by the grazing insects.


Eventually the caterpillars morph into “polka dot wasp moths,” strange little blue moths that are nowhere near as interesting as their furry counterparts.

Okay… so I went a little overboard snapping photos of bugs.

Trust me: they were fascinating! They kept me entertained for quite a while.

It just goes to show that sometimes the most interesting wildlife encounters are right beneath our noses….in the shrubbery.