This Space for Rent

A mysterious moth

Mothette

One of our neighbors is putting in a retaining wall at the front of their property, and the vendor they hired to do the work defines “putting in a retaining wall” as “bulldoze the front lawn down to bedrock, put a wall in, then truck in new earth and grass.” It seems a terribly expensive way to pile rock up at the front on a lawn, but it’s not without its benefits to the neighbors; yesterday, after I realized what was going on, I got permission to cart away several wheelbarrels of sod, which went into our backyard in 5 places where we’d previously removed clubhouses, overly aggressive bushes (we had one bush that, by the time we realized what was going on, had expanded to cover 8 m2. Soon after that, it was ripped out, but that left 8 m2 of bare dirt that gathered nothing except for weeds. Until yesterday,) nasty aggressive prickly-leaved blue flowers, and masses of concrete that used to be part of a driveway before we rezoned it as greenspace. Today the rest of that lawn had, in a triumph of american-style destruction, been trucked off to a landfill (I am the sort of homeowner who, if sod isn’t available, will sod new ground by digging grass out between concrete slabs and transplanting it. You might laugh, but when I ripped out 12 m2 of concrete last spring that’s how I sodded it in, and by last July it was the most enthusiastically growing grass on the property) but dozens of little chrysalises like this were scattered around the construction site.

I presume it’s a moth. I don’t think it’s a dinosaur (we’re reading The Enormous Egg to the bears these days, and so dinosaur eggs, particularly in a story placed in a part of the world where a “Mrs. Parsons” may be based on my grandmother or a slightly more distant relation) or Mothra, but one never knows.

Comments


Glassy Cutworm Larva

http://mint.ippc.orst.edu/glasscutid.htm

Heidi in NE Portland Sat Jun 21 20:11:07 2008

oops, pupa.

Me again Sat Jun 21 20:11:50 2008

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