One on one with a caterpillar

Important wilderness safety tip: Should you, while in what any well-adjusted urbanite would call “the out-of-doors” discover that a fellow reveler in nature has unknowingly become the perch of any of the many varieties of living things to be found in the out-of-doors, such as caterpillars, make no exclamatory statement whatsoever, joyful, fearful or otherwise. The effect of doing so will most probably be to illicit first a reaction that could bring harm to whateverhad come to rest on the companion, a caterpillar, say, and only moments later a reaction that borders on harm to you, even if it was something very harmless, like a caterpillar, to begin with. For the purposes of illustrating this argument, I’ll introduce a story. Though, really it’s exactly what happened above with myself, my wife and a caterpillar as the main characters. In the end, the caterpillar wasn’t harmed but if it could be startled, certainly was by the way my wife moved violently to shake the caterpillar free of her shirt. There was some vocalization as well, if I recall. I, too, was unharmed, but startled in the kind of way that makes your pupils dilate. After the caterpillar was rescued and restored to a more natural setting, I photographed it and later identified it as a Forest Tent Caterpillar. The most difficult aspect of making this shot was coping with the continuous movement of the caterpillar. Extremely engergetic, this one.