Hummingbird Clearwing Moth

The photo shows a Hummingbird Clearwing moth buzzing about Anne’s neck. We were folding the tent’s ground cloth on the back deck, when this insect took a shine to Anne’s green jersey collar. It was buzzing around her head so fast that it was difficult to see what it was. At first, I thought it might be a bee. It turned out to be a pollinator of a different sort. After I snapped this photo, I just flicked it away and we all went inside to get away from it. This event kind of reminded me of that Star Trek – Next Generation episode, “Conspiracy”, where an alien life form attempts to takeover Star Fleet by possessing all of the senior officers with parasitic mind controlling aliens that manifested their infestation, with a little stinger sticking out of the back of the host-officer’s neck. I am pleased to report that this moth caused no heads to explode, unlike the TV show.

Anne is wearing her new follow the goat Kaldi’s jersey, because even though today was a rest day, we rode. We toured Sugar Island, which I had never been on before. We took the ferry across and did a small loop around the northern part of the island. Except for a one mile stretch of gravel, all the rest of the pavement there was like butter. There is almost no heavy truck traffic. In fact, there is almost no traffic at all. Most of the cars that we did see were in the vicinity of the senior luncheon at the community center, which we were invited to join several times. Maybe we should have had lunch there and eschewed Clyde’s, because now my Clyde’s lunch is warring with my Cozy Inn supper.

Tomorrow, we get back on the bikes for real and head southeast to De Tour and then the next day back to Saint Ignace and then we are done. We are sitting at over 200 miles so far and should have well over more than 300 by the end. These next two days will be a bit of a repeat of a similar tour that Anne and I did way back in 1981. It was our dress rehearsal tour, for the next year’s great adventure, our tour around the USA. I’m hoping that tomorrow and the next day go smoother than lo these many years ago went. It should.

A real hummingbird just flitted by the windows. It was probably jealous about all of the attention that the moth received here. As Rey pointed out to me, it is the real article, an actual noun and not just an adjective. Hummingbirds are all high-strung grammar Nazis.