Back at the beginning of the month I took you down to my “thinking chair” and introduced you to two beautiful little flowers that were blooming there. Both were white, both were exquisite and both were very small. The smaller of the two flowers belonged to a species of plant called marsh bedstraw (Galium palustre), which I had never personally seen before. Sometimes, when you look down instead of up, you find things simply because you are finally looking in their direction.

Well, things couldn’t have worked out better for me with the discovery of this plant. It turns out that I have another species of bedstraw — lady’s bedstraw (G. verum) — blooming in my yard in much greater quantity than the rough bedstraw that was so unobtrusively growing at the margins of one of my trails. I’ve known about lady’s bedstraw for years but hadn’t really given it much thought — until last week.

I was out pulling weeds when I noticed something quite odd on the ground. What, exactly, was I looking at? It took me a moment to figure out that is was an extremely large caterpillar. Unlike anything I had ever seen before, this creature needed to be identified immediately. I very gently picked it up and brought it to my garage. I left it sitting on one of my leather gloves while I went into the house to get my camera and then came back outside and started taking photos.

I decided that a “natural” background would be best, so I returned to the spot where I discovered the caterpillar and gently placed the creature on a grass stem. I needed something that would keep the caterpillar still while I used both hands to operate my camera and fortunately the grass worked.

After all the photos were taken, I headed back inside to try to identify the caterpillar. A pea-green body decorated with yellow spots outlined in black is pretty distinctive and that red “horn” only made things easier. I had found the caterpillar (or larva) of a bedstraw hawkmoth (Hyles gallii). Also known as the galium sphynx, this insect is so strongly connected to the bedstraw plant that both of its common and scientific names refer to the genus name for the bedstraw.

The caterpillars (which are about 3 inches long) feed on bedstraw leaves.

They then pupate in a chrysalis that looks just like a slug and emerge as extremely beautiful adult moths with a triangular shape and bold brown-and-white markings on their wings. In-flight, those wings stretch out to the sides to give the moth a 3-inch wingspan and the underwings are decorated with a gorgeous blush of wine-red. The adults feed on a variety of flowers in the summertime and it is now my personal mission to see if I can find one of these moths in August.

Wish me luck.

Bill Danielson has been a professional writer and nature photographer for 22 years. He has worked for the National Park Service, the US Forest Service and the Massachusetts State Parks and currently teaches high school biology and physics. Visit speakingofnature.com for more information, or go to Speaking of Nature on Facebook.

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