Now that the weather is cooling down I’ve been going for a lot of morning hikes.  It’s a great time to clear my head and make plans for the day.  I’m so excited because my favorite hiking spot is going to be only 3 miles from the new house.

I’ve been watching some changes in the landscape very closely this week.  We’ve had a good monsoon so there’s extra vegetation and lots of green.  On Monday I noticed a lot of lush new low-growing plants (weeds?). 

On Tuesday they were even bigger. 

Wednesday they were covered with thousands of caterpillars munching away!  You had to literally watch every single step for a stretch of the trail or you would squish them.  I’ve never seen so many caterpillars.

Thursday the lush plants looked bare.  The leaves have all been eaten and all that remained were stick looking stems. 

And Friday, there were very few caterpillars left.  They are moving to areas far off the trail from what I can tell.  I’m going to be watching for cocoons soon and need to do some research to figure out what these are.  They’re long and fat - up to 4 inches long.

I took pictures to post but am having trouble getting the pic to show up here.  I’ll work on that and try to get it to work.