“Hearding Cats” Springfield Plateau article by Bob & Barb Kipfer

Ever have a friend ask if you will adopt a cat?  How about 170 cats?  And what if they are such good friends that you can’t say no.

Chris and Deb Barnhart raise a wide variety of butterfly and moth eggs for the Butterfly House and end up with lots of caterpillars, a.k.a. “cats” which voraciously feed on sacks of leaves.  Eventually they need to be farmed out to someone with more trees than sense.  That would be us.

We met at a local restaurant to make the exchange with Chris bringing them in a cooler.  Caterpillars are sensitive to drying out and the heat of a cooking car.  He had bags of Promethea, Polyphemus, and Luna silk moth cats.  Spoken in a restaurant, these words sound like new varieties of illegal “bath salts”.  We received a lot of curious looks and left quickly with them before someone called the DEA.

To read the rest of this informative article with photographs click here: http://springfieldmn.blogspot.com/2012/06/herding-cats.html

Bob and Barbara Kipfer are members of Friends of the Garden and the Springfield Plateau Chapter of the Missouri Master Naturalist™ which is a community based natural resource education and volunteer program. Its purpose is to develop a corps of well-informed volunteers to provide education, outreach and service dedicated to the beneficial management of natural resources and natural areas within their communities for the State of Missouri.