I know many lament the twice yearly changing of the clocks but I am one who relishes springing forward every year. It means I can finally do outside activities after dinner (we eat around 5:30-6pm) and thus that means evening walks can resume once again. I’ve been walking in my neighborhood fairly regularly since we moved here nearly 12 years ago. For most of 2020 I took to biking the area because I had more time to dedicate to that with working from home and being able to be more flexible with time at that point, but walking shuffled back into the forefront of priorities in 2021 with the return to the office and school. Sometimes I walk and listen to audiobooks, and sometimes I listen to the sounds around me. Always I’m on the lookout for nature.
Last year was an anomaly. I barely walked. That really extended back into late summer 2022 when long term hip aggravations turned into something more problematic, leading me to spend a significant amount of time in physical therapy rehabilitating a combination of issues brought on or exacerbated by middle-age. Paired with some other things I decided to take care of that I’d put off for too long, walking in the evenings or even on my lunch hours became a forgotten activity.
An acquaintance of mine in Florida has taken to rucking, something I started seeing several years ago with fitness influencers such as Melissa Urban. When I first saw people promoting it I chuckled to myself because it reminded me of back in the 90s when my brother and dad would fill up a backpack for Scouts to go walk the local streets to prepare for their big backpacking trips. And it really just reminded me of backpacking itself and the act of preparing for any kind of long hike. The only way to prepare is to actually do the act itself—hiking with a loaded pack. Our recent trip to the Smokies brought this idea of rucking back to mind and so when we returned last week I dug out one of my smaller daypacks that had a hip belt and threw in my pair of soft sided leg weights, 20lbs total, and off I went, “rucking” in my neighborhood.
I hadn’t roamed the streets in many months and a lot had changed. One of the lots I had seen beginning to be cleared last summer now has a full sized house sitting on it. And so it has gone the last five years since the county, and many counties in Texas, jacked up values. Anyone holding onto an extra lot or two are now putting for sale signs on them and selling them to developers. The same thing happened to the lot where I found these salt marsh moth (Estigmene acrea) caterpillars munching on the Texas ragwort (Senecio ampullaceus) a few days ago. It’s a couple of doors down from my house and on the upper reaches of the pond I live on and subsequently is a lot that will flood. It’s not very deep, though, that didn’t stop a potential buyer from purchasing the lot and then clearing it of yaupon and other shrubs and most of the trees, before flipping it to another person who bought it and is now sitting on it and trying to sell it again. Since the clearing, the land has been trying to revegetate itself, winding its way through succession. I’m just glad we get to see a large plot of ragwort this spring to brighten the mess the clearing left behind.
I noticed the first salt marsh moth on a plant closer to the road and stopped to marvel at its fuzziness before looking up into the lot and realizing the full picture. This place was loaded with caterpillars! Certainly more than I’ve ever seen at this location. Across the street is another empty lot, this one owned by the city after continual flooding and the house burning down, so I’ve roamed that lot, too, in my previous years of walking the neighborhood. There are always a few salt marsh moth caterpillars in this area but I’d never seen this many before!
Despite their common name, salt marsh moths are not relegated to salt marshes. They are found throughout the US, and of course can be found in salt marshes but also woodlands, farm fields, grasslands, freshwater marshes, and recently cleared lots in neighborhoods. Their host plants vary and cover an array of plant families. Generalists instead of specialists! Part of the tiger moth subfamily, Arctiinae, their extended cousins include the milkweed tussock moth, giant leopard moth, and fall webworm moth.
Salt marsh moth adults are beautiful moths, with a white forewings speckled with black spots and a very fuzzy white head. Adult males will have yellowish to orange hind wings while the female’s are white.
Resuming my walks last week, coming off the high of being in the Smokies and the allure of a land of so many waterfalls and beautiful sights around every bend in the trail, I was somewhat depressed to think about walking my neighborhood again. Why couldn’t I be walking some quiet rural road instead? I was thinking of ways to change the situation. How could we move somewhere more remote? Most of that was wishful thinking, but sometimes the jolt of seeing a new place reminds us that we’ve been cooped up in our own box too long and returning to the box can feel stifling.
But once I started down the road and came across the ragwort patch filled with chomping salt marsh moth caterpillars, I was astonished. This little plot of land, which I’m sure will one day have a house upon it, was at least, for now, a home for hundreds of caterpillars. Because no one had come through and mowed, they’d been given a chance to live. The caterpillars that don’t make it to adults will become bird food. Some will perish crossing the road—I saw several squished cats on the road. When they become adults, they’ll become both bat and bird food. The ones who manage to persevere through all of that will mate and continue the cycle again.
I don’t know if there is any particular lesson here other than repeating what Mary Oliver said in Sometimes:
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
It’s probably the most quoted part of that poem, maybe one of her most popular, though probably not as quoted as Wild Geese. Digging into Sometimes a bit more and I find:
Later I was in a field full of sunflowers.
I was feeling the head of midsummer.
I was thinking of the sweet, electric
drowse of creation,when it began to break.
In the west, clouds gathered.
Thunderheads.
In an hour the sky was filled with them.In an hour the sky was filled
with the sweetness of rain and the blast of lightning.
Followed by the deep bells of thunder.Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!The lighting brighter than any flower.
The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.
Can you feel the intensity of those sentences? The electricity in your body? The saccharine divine of the sunflowers?
And at the end:
After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listenedto the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.
Walk slowly and listen.
That’s what my neighborhood walks are for. Paying attention to the tiniest things like empty lots filled with caterpillars leads you to “listen to the crazy roots”, bringing you to see the abundance of what is around you. We filter out so much, every day, even the best of us who are looking and taking it all in.
Can you imagine how much everyone else is missing?
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and In the Weeds. She hosts one podcast, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and recently retired The Garden Path Podcast.
Pay attention! Love it! Spread the word!
Great pictures and article - I'm always fascinated by the visual differences between the caterpillar and moth/butterfly they turn into.