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Updated: May 24, 2025
Probably, too, the mother birds frighten their young ones by telling them that, if they aren't good, the puss-moth caterpillar will be after them; while the poor caterpillar himself, never having known a mother's care, has had no one to tell him that if he goes on making such awful faces he will be struck like that one day. These delvings into natural history bring back my youth very vividly.
"The caterpillar of the puss-moth, not satisfied with Nature's provisions for its safety, makes faces at young birds, and is said to alarm them considreably." I like that "is said to."
Presently disappearing beneath a small plantain leaf, she quickly emerged, drawing behind her not a spider, as in the case of her smaller predecessor, but a big green caterpillar, nearly double her own length, and as large around as a slate-pencil a peculiar, pungent, waspy-scented species of "puss-moth" larva, which is found on the elm, and with which I chanced to be familiar.
But whether he alarms them or not, the fact remains that the caterpillar of the puss-moth does make faces at young birds; and we may be pretty sure that, even if he began the practice in self-defence, the habit is one that has grown on him. Indeed, I can see him actually looking out for a thrush's nest, and then climbing up to it, popping his head over the edge suddenly and making a face.
And of course caterpillars of the puss-moth variety oughtn't to make faces at timid young thrushes. But it is just these things which make such pleasant memories afterwards when professors and toads are departed, when the hammers lie rusty in the coal cellar, and when the young thrushes are grown up to be quite big birds.
I never kept a puss-moth, but I had a goat-moth which ate its way out of a match-box, and as far as I remember took all the matches with it. There were caterpillars, though, of a gentler nature who stayed with me, and of these some were obliging enough to turn into chrysalises. Not all by any means. A caterpillar is too modest to care about changing in public.
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