The Face of a Friend {NSM}

While we were trying to identify this moth in a HUGE book of Butterflies and Moths...

Whoa! check out that tail...

...flipping through the field guide, we came upon the picture of this moth we'd found and pinned last month.

Funny, we hadn't looked it up before. However, I do know WHY we didn't look it up. Same story as before. Have you ever tried to identify a butterfly?! There are LOTS of different butterflies and moths in the world, and it seems like the ones we find in real life never make it into the books.

So, it can be somewhat frustrating, that.

Anyway, a thrill came over me when I happened on the page...


It was kind of like spotting the face of a friend in a crowd, or more like happening upon a familiar face in someone else's photo album. 'Cause after you've spent time with a live thing and further, repeatedly come back to gaze at it on display, it gets to be rather like the familiar face of a friend.

Perhaps it helps that the upper sides of his wings actually LOOK like a face; an owl's face, to be precise. And we have an owl that lives nearby. Right.

Speaking of moths and butterflies...

Have you heard about Maria Sibylla Merian?! Thanks to Google, I recently learned about this awesome lady, who I am sure I would have longed to be familiar face-to-face friends with, had I too lived in the 1600's. She travelled all the way to South America to study insects... Yes. Go ahead and read that again. A woman. In the 1600's. Who travelled to S.America to study insects. Amazing.
You can read/see more about her right here:




::



::

'kay, so we're accumulating posts here for April's nature studies... care to join us?

::



::