Photo 4182984, (c) Daniel George, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC), uploaded by Daniel George

Attribution © Daniel George
some rights reserved
Uploaded by danielgeorge danielgeorge
Source iNaturalist
Associated observations

Photos / Sounds

What

Carolina Sphinx (Manduca sexta)

Observer

danielgeorge

Date

July 4, 2016 11:12 AM PDT

Description

Found this while dismantling a chicken warming hutch that prior owners had left. I'm uncertain whether it had been holed up in the plastic / aluminum framing or whether is possibly accidentally knocked it from a jimsonweed. As I was organizing broken parts of the framing I suddenly saw it on the ground. Seems liked I knocked it off the framing, but perhaps it only had just grabbed that after that part of the frame fell into a jimsonweed? I put the caterpillar on the nearby walnut thinking it might crawl up to find somewhere to form a chrysalis, but it crawled toward the ground and dropped to the soil. Thinking it was vulnerable, I put it in the tree again, but it returned to the ground again. This time I watched it slink over to the loose soil near the remaining part of the hutch foundation. It then spent a couple of minutes digging into the soil. It got about half its body down, then emerged again and walked rapidly in another direction. It was heading toward a wide open area, so I placed it below a large nearby jimsonweed. It lay motionless for quite a while. So I got up and did something else for less than a minute, checked back and could not find the caterpillar again.

Sizes