Elephant hawk-moth caterpillar

This blip should have had a title like "Inge's birthday party" or something similar. Next Tuesday will be Inge's birthday but that's a school day so we celebrated the upcoming birthday today. During the whole day relatives came to visit and we all had a great time. When asked a couple of weeks ago what she would like for her birthday, Inge answered: "a yellow fire truck and a box". That first one proved somewhat difficult; for some reason these things are always red :-) Jiska, one of her cousins, did make up for that by creating a puzzle with a drawing of a yellow fire truck. How cool is that?

The second one was not that much of a problem: all her birthday gifts were wrapped in great boxes and one of her gifts was actually a set of 21 boxes with all sorts of crafts stuff. Inge loved it!

For most of the day however, Inge was gone. She was playing with a friend and we figured that since it's her birthday party she should be allowed to have some fun. And fun she had!

In the meantime, Nienke and her cousins Jiska and Silvana had fun on the swings, just like they did on Nienke's birthday. And I took over 100 pictures during the day, with some that looked like they could be my blip for today.

At some point, Nienke, Jiska and Silvana came running to the house, squealing like... well... like little girls that had seen something weird. I followed them, thinking they were just very hyper and there was probably a bee or something. I wasn't really prepared for this 7 cm long and very fat caterpillar with huge fake eyes. Until that moment, I had never seen anything like that before...

Some googling revealed that this is the caterpillar of an Elephant Hawk-moth (or Groot Avondrood in Dutch). I don't think I have ever seen the moth itself either, by the way. Another cool site showing the transformation from caterpillar to moth can be found here (explanation in Dutch, but the process can be viewed just fine without being able to read the words).

I have uploaded another shot to Picasaweb; this shows its legs and head and can be found here.

The caterpillar was unharmed and we set it free after the photo shoot...