Nature Girl Strikes Again...

Last evening as my daughter was searching for her friend the 'Praying Mantis' she found something even MORE amazing!

This beautiful Luna or Lunar Moth... This isn't the first time she's been lucky enough to come upon one of these beautiful creatures. One Fall several years ago she found a very large catapillar about the size of an obese gherkin pickle... It was bright green with orange spots... She kept the catapillar in a screened bug house and fed it regularly... Eventually the catapillar made a cocoon inside the bug house and stayed that way for so long we thought it had died... The following summer she was standing in the garage and heard a noise coming from the shelf nearby which held odds and ends... She followed the noise and there on the shelf, inside the bug house was this ENORMOUS green moth... At that time we had no clue what we were looking at but fortunately we had the internet to help us out... The life of a Luna Moth seems quite pitiful to me... An egg becomes a catapillar that spends it's 'catapillar days' eating as much as it possibly can... Then spends most of it's life sleeping in a cocoon until it can at last emerge into this amazingly beautiful creature... But the irony is, it has no mouth so it only lives long enough to mate and lay eggs before it dies... So basically it's Born... It Eats... It Sleeps... It has Sex and then it Dies.... What's the purpose? Other than to enchant us with its beauty?

I swear this girl of mine is a magnet for all of the amazing things that nature has to offer... I've learned it doesn't just happen by chance though... She has the uncanny ability to look past the ordinary and see all of the wonders beyond... That and maybe there is a bit of magic she posesses... She attracts butterflies who on others would simply flutter away but with my daughter they perch upon her fingers and hang out awhile so my daughter can give onlookers a lesson on how they eat with their long probiscus or simply a chance to admire the beauty in the detail of a Swallowtail or a Monarch's wing design.

There's a story one of the staff members at my kids school tells of a visit to the creek with my daughter... He reiterates the story so well, I'm sure I won't do it justice but it went something like this... "I was sitting on a log reading my book and 'S' was doing all of those things she normally does when we go to the creek... Walking around in the water, eyes darting back and forth, posture always at the ready... Lifting old logs and picking up large rocks... At one point she walked over to me with a salamander in each hand... So I looked at her and I said, "Wow... I've come here many times and I've never seen a salamander before and you have two of them?"... That's when she looked back at me with those big brown eyes and said, "Do you ever pick up rocks and look under them?" And I said, "No, I haven't." And she said, with that flabbergasted look that only a kid can give to an adult who just doesn't seem to get it... "Well you should."

My daughter makes me think we ALL should look under the rocks more often.