Sure. What's the trick to posting photos? I've forgotten. Don

Larry Not to belabor this topic, since you IDed the moth, but I am really grateful for your zeroing in on it. One reason I was so interested was because I hadn't seen the moth before, and I see from the map it's been commonly found two states west of Georgia, in Missouri. OTOH, we do have apple trees, blueberry bushes, clover and plenty of dandelions. Those are apparently some of the host plants they feed on, not beans, so the moth probably wasn't on an egg-laying mission and was roosting, as you say. We also have two pear trees not far from the garden that they may have been attracted to, though they aren't listed as a host plant for the larvae. (Scopula limboundata) Larvae feed on the leaves of a variety of plants, including apple trees, blueberries, clovers, dandelions, wild cherry trees. http://www.hsu.edu/content.aspx?id=6587 As for the caterpillar, if they're chewing on my vegetable crops and there aren't too many of them, I like to hand-remove them and toss them out where they can be recycled into the local bird-diets. If there's an infestation of them that I can't keep down to a dull roar, I have Bt in my arsenal of insecticides.

Just a guess, it is a little hard to tell. Not sure what part of Florida you are in but I believe the virginia creeper sphinx is known to live here, at least in some of Florida.

Thanks Jean I guess I just wanted to check out what was happening on the ground. I was working for a chap that was using SIT (sterile Insect Technique)to control moths. We wanted to ready for any quarantine incursion that might happen here and we were using LBAM as our target pest so we would have some idea how moths respond. It was just a bit of good luck that we have been doing some work on our native moth that is now a pest for you. The results of the trial work are not all finished yet, but it looks promising. Oregon would probably be LBAM heaven, from what I have seen here, a bit cooler and wetter than California. In one of our glasshouses set at about 25DegC the moths just cleaned up grapes, roses, olives,verbena, plums ,apples and even the weeds. I believe this moth will just about eat anything including pine needles. I doubt you will be able to quarantine this moth to California so it will be eradication or surrender. There must be some natural predators here tho because we are finding it hard to catch them in the wild. In two weeks time I am going to set light traps in an orchard that has been sprayed for fruit fly over the summer. I believe the fruit fly sprays may have killed off some predators and we may find some moths there. In my own orchard I did no spraying yet found no moths. We might get some clues as to what predates them by comparing the sprayed to non sprayed orchard.