Through photographs we had taken. Through sketches from the day before. Through the fragments of noticing that stayed with us. Slowly, the fuzzy white body we had followed beneath the bench came to be identified as a hickory tussock moth caterpillar. We wondered about its relations:
what it feeds on?
what feeds on it?
Whether it is protected, where it appears, and how it moves through the ecologies of this place.
We learned about its venomous hairs, its late-summer presence, and how it exists across urban, suburban, and forested spaces in Southern Ontario. And yet, the more we learned, the less settled it felt.
Facts were not the only things that came forward. Stories surfaced too.