This morning, it was a female cardinal with her short, sharp chirps. She was foraging in the ground vines about 10 feet away from the porch.
These poor vincas flourished in the spring - I swear I could watch it grow! But then the caterpillars came. Each one curled a leaf up into a nest. Every single leaf of the vines. We're talking an area 20 x 20 feet. And every single leaf died. I'm assuming the caterpillars turned into moths and flew away. (Wouldn't it be cool if they all flew on the same night, like coral releasing their polyps?) But I didn't see that happen once. I just had leafless vine stems. Hmmm.. Still green vine stems... Then, the leaves started growing back! And not only that, but many times, each place there had been a leaf, now 2 were growing, producing a new vine offshoot. Clever plant!
The cardinals love the caterpillars. (Not in a boy/girl kind of way. More in a steak, pizza or ice cream kind of way.) So they forage a lot in the vines. Even now that the old dead leaves/caterpillar nests are gone. So perhaps some caterpillars didn't successfully transform - their leaves just dropped to the ground with a dead caterpiller in it, and that's now what the cardinals are loving. I imagine the meal the cardinals find now is like the fermented walrus or seal stuff the eskimoes eat after burying it in the ground for awhile.
So... the cats got to watch all this happening.
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