A few days ago, I was doing my daily routine of checking up on my plants. I have a few potted flowering plants, chili plants, and a calamansi plant which is becoming really big. I usually check if their leaves look “happy” and if the flowering plants still continue to have buds on them.
Then I saw this:
Was it looking into the camera? Yikes.
Full "body" shot.
I know caterpillars love calamansi leaves. That’s where I got my skin rashes when I was a kid.”Nahigad ka,” said the elders and they washed my arm with vinegar. Mahapdi yun, but I guess it worked.
I don’t even know how it got there. We live on the 18th floor. Maybe a bird put it there? A butterfly flew 18 floors up and left it there? I can’t even focus right when I was taking pictures of it this morning. I feel an unexplained fear and disgust especially when I am trying to take a macro shot. Ewww.
So far it ate around four leaves of my plant. It’s either I’d ask my husband to take it out, bring the caterpillar to the ground floor, and transfer it to another shrub in the complex or…
I wait for it to undergo metamorphosis and become a butterfly. That’s probably interesting to take photos of too. I wonder when that will happen.
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It must be a childhood thing because all of us siblings (at least all of us sisters, not sure if my brother would agree too) are not very fond of these creatures. My mother had anturium plants back in the 80s and she would tell us to help tend to the plants. And every time, we would see those huge white worms with huge brown/black eyes in those anturium leaves. Not to mention a really big glossy, colored, animal book we had when we were kids, it had a spread page of one macro front shot of the same green caterpillar. We used to make use of that page to tease my big sister, she’d cry whenever she sees it.
Right now my parents live in a house with a bigger garden space. She is gifted with a green thumb that she can even resurrect plants that she just picked from somewhere. She could never kill any plant. That’s probably the reason our friends describe our house as “The Hobbit House” or “a house from fairy tales like Hansel & Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood.” It looked like a hidden house inside a thick forest. Hehehe.
