How annoying-- I'm not sure if you'll be able to see my photobucket photos- click on "view all" button. Here's also a wikipedia link to the Nymphalis antiopa that I just found searching online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymphalis_antiopa Does that seem like the right match? We DO have a big Chinese Elm out front, which it seems to like to feed on. Do you know if we'll have any problems with these little buggers eating our other plants? Thank you!

Thank you Judy--While it seems a little macabre to ask for an ID--it's good to know what it might have possibly been. Also, that the sapling might be a willow. I'll keep a better on it.

We must be neighbors. I, too saw that moth yesterday in my yard, in Canton. It was near my petunias yesterday evening. I first thought it was a hummingbird. My mother-in-law insisted it was a baby hummingbird. But, hummingbirds do not have antenna. I got a pretty good look at it. It stayed around for a while and nearly hit me in the head. It was close enough to my ear to hear it buzzing. It sounded like a hummingbird, but, didn't quite move quick enough though. WOW. Nature is fantastic. I never knew that they existed.

Hummingbird moths are also sphinx moths, but the ones generally called that are the dayflying sphinx moths that nectar on flowers (or rotting fruit if available), like the Snowberry Clearwing that resembles a large bumblebee, and the Nessus sphinx that is a beautiful reddish brown with two cream colored stripes across the lower abdomen. Few of the sphinx fly during the day, and most are nocturnal, as is the Tomato and Tobacco Hornworm moths. You can generally spot them at dusk, just as light is beginning to wane, or in the early morning just before sunrise. The adult moths have 5 yellow spots on either side of their abdomen in the case of the Tomato Hornworm, and 6 spots of yellow in the case of the Tobacco Hornworm moth. Their wings move just as a Hummingbirds, too, and they hover at flowers like them also. They are fascinating to watch because no other moth family does this. Moths outnumber butterflies by 10 to 1. The tomato and tobacco hornworms use Solanaceous plants for larval food, e.g., tomato, tobacco, pepper, potatoe, Datura, Brugmansia and many more. However, tomato is generally the favored food. The Tobacco and Tomato Hornworms are large sphinx moths as indicated by the size of the caterpillars. The Hummingbird moths, like the Snowberry and the Nessus, are much smaller. I find larvae of the Snowberry Clearwing on my large honeysuckle vine, and the Nessus on my Virginia Creeper, which hosts a wide variety of various species of sphinx caterpillars. They are very cool to raise. Hope this may inspire some of you to observe them in the garden. They aren't all bad. Susan Here is a link that might be useful: Tobacco and Tomato Hornworms and Adult Moths