Find Elmo....

Can you find Elmo?  He is Dan and my new pet!

Actually I was cutting our prodigious Tecoma Sparky bush and I thought he was a leaf....until my fingers touched him.  (Note to myself: even when an Arizona plant doesn’t have thorns or spikes, ALWAYS wear gloves.)

We have never seen any thing like this.

Look at Elmo holding onto the branch with his little “feet.”

Elmo got quite upset with me when I tried to measure how tall he was.  I was watching out for his spiked tail, and then he faced off with me and looked like he wanted to bite me.  I remembered the old western rule, “Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.”  With Elmo the new Graybill rule is, “Don’t bring a camera to a tooth fight.” 

Elmo won. I backed off.

When stretching out as he crawls, Elmo is five inches long.  A monster insect with eyes that reflect red in the light!

Upon extensive research, I found that Elmo is quite harmless to humans, but he does love to eat up all the leaves on my flowering shrubs.

He is a Manduca Sextra (L.), commonly known as a Tobacco Hornworm, named after the spiky horn on the end of his body.  Elmo is a caterpillar.

And someday he will transform into this....

A beautiful Carolina Sphinx Moth with a five inch wing span!

It was noted in an article I read that children like to keep the hornworm for a pet.  We have several grandchildren that are are vying to have Elmo, but the Post Office refused to ship him on the grounds that he is perishable.