Wooly Bear
I was in a rush, heading from my office to a side door in the main building that opened to a room full of work waiting for me to attend to. There’s been a lot of construction going on in this section of the building, and the workers had just today dumped a couple of pallets of metal siding right by the door I use to enter the building. As I crossed the pavement, I noticed a small brown shape moving at a fairly good clip across the asphalt, away from the pile of siding.
It turned out to be a wooly bear, heavy on the brown, light on the black ends: a good omen for a short, easy winter. I reached down to pick him up and rescue him, when I realized I didn’t have time to run him across the vast lot to an appropriately sheltered grassy spot. I was needed in the building now, so I made mental note of where Wooly was, figured he couldn’t get too far, and decided to rescue him when I passed that way again, heading back to my office.
It took longer than I thought it would to get through my work in that department, and nearly an hour had passed by the time I was able to get back outside. I held out little hope that Wooly would still be there, but even twenty-five feet away I could see the little blob of fuzz not five feet from where I left him.
When I was close enough to really see him, I became confused. The poor thing was dead, but he looked far smaller in death than the wooly bear I’d seen an hour before. I scanned that area of the lot, and became aware that there were perhaps a dozen wooly bears scattered about the area.
They were all apparently dead. I couldn’t tell why some were dead; they seemed perfectly intact, but were stretched out straight and stiff (a living wooly bear will curl up in you palm when you pick it up). Other wooly bears played Don Quixote, tilting at the local variety of windmill otherwise known as semi-truck tires and losing. I gave up on finding any alive, and headed back to my office.
About fifteen feet away from the epicenter of wooly bear genocide, I encountered one last brave caterpillar sluggishly making his way toward the grove of trees nearly fifty yards away. His path would have taken him straight through the most heavily trafficked area of the arrival docks, a totally suicidal path for the fuzz ball. I picked him up and carried him over to a densely thicketed area that had plenty of leaf litter for him to burrow under. I tossed him into the center of the thicket, where the local birds and beasts would be least likely to find him, wished him well, and returned to my office.
I need to brush up on my proper animal/insect names. Until I got to the part where you called him a caterpiller, I had an image in my mind of you finding a bunch of little dead bears! I was thinking, Oh my God! What happened to them all?!
Glad to hear you found one to save.
I have never heard them called Wooley Bears before, that’s a great name.
And I bestow upon you the Humanitarian Award for Saving Small Creatures From Certain Dealth by a Crushing Mechanism.
🙂
How strange, I wonder what killed them.
Ok, I was right there with Jade. I hadn’t planned to admit it, but since I’m not alone, I shall admit my lack of knowledge. LOL! And I really wanted to see one of those tiny bears – alive.
~QE
I thought it was the length of fur on the Wooley Bears that determined the fierocity of the winter? But what do I know? We don’t even have them here, I don’t think. Not only that, but it’s in the Central Valley of California. I only remember two really good snows, and one really hard, five days long freeze. Our record low temperature for this town is 8. Pretty paltry compared to your winters.
~Cali
As a kid I used to gather all the wooly bears I could find in the vain attempt to keep them as pets. Strangely, they all disappeared from the jars I put them in overnight, and I would have to go out in search of more the next day.
To this day I still don’t know if my folks were trying to discourage me from collecting them, or sending me out to scour the neighborhood and local woods to tire me out!
Alli
*BIG SMILE* you go girl!
This was a good entry Salamander. You must be a good hearted person going to all that trouble for those "wooly bears". V did something like that for a turtle in the road last summer.
Love,
Star
My heart goes out to you and the last wooly bear. Thank you for saving him or her!
Also, commiserations re cost of fees for kitten from hell, tsk tsk. I’m sure you must be at the top of some list of ‘good people to be rewarded asap’.
Oh my goodness!!!!
I had to read the start of this twice as I thought you were talking about a "woolly bear". I had images of a cross between a brown bear and a grizzle bear I think you guys have running around the streets.
LOL…..was I mistaken. You are referring to a caterpillar??? Dont they bite?? Our ones do !!
We have these hairy ugly caterpillars that cling to the trunk of a tree, and I can tell you, there must be thousands and thousands of these guys. Gross!!!!!!
Anyway…. glad you did a good deed of the day 🙂
ck
Someone has to watch out for the little guys in this world and you were kind enough to do so. Kudos to you, dear lady.
Could you do a container and hanging garden? How much area do you have on your patio?
http://www.gardenseeker.com/container_gardening.htm
http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/hil/hil-8105.html
http://www.poolandpatio.co.uk/WebPages/Containers.asp
Alli