Christmas blog text for review
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Fred Schueler
Dec 27, 2025, 12:16:32 PM12/27/25
to Eastern Ontario Natural History listserve
Listers,
Here's a draft for resuming posting at our -
http://www.doingnaturalhistory.com/ - blog. Aleta thinks it's weird to
start with the Green Christmas song, and I wonder what experience others
have had with Noctua pronuba, so if there are opinions or data on these
questions...
fred.
====================================================
Green Splats of Christmas
In 2023, Andy Fyon noted - “it has been a green Christmas in Ottawa.
Temp is +1° C and headed to +3° C with showers today,” and this required
an update to a popular Christmas song –
I'm dreaming of a green Christmas
when photosynthesis goes on,
When pronuba nibbles, and parliaments quibble
promoting oily profits' song.
I'm dreaming of a green Christmas
With every lobbyist who's paid
To strain his tonsils to promote fossils
in horrid braying carol strains...
I'm dreaming of a green Christmas
With Crocodyles on Baffin's Isle
Where greenhouse gasses, we sing, surpasses
The Eocene that's back in style.
While it’s well known that fossil fuel lobbyists work to promote the
heat death of civilization, and that with the high carbon dioxide
concentrations of the Eocene, what are now tropical creatures throve in
what is now the Canadian Arctic, the hibernal nibbling of larval Noctua
pronuba is a less well known phenomenon, and at the time I did not
anticipate how much less conspicuous it was to become in a couple of years.
Noctua pronuba, the Large Yellow Underwing Moth, is a widespread species
in Eurasia, which showed up in Nova Scotia around 1979, and has now
spread across North America to Mexico and Alaska. While we’ve never seen
an adult in Bishops Mills, caterpillars subsequently recognized as this
species first showed up in 2012 on our doing-the-streets transect
(Canada: Ontario: Grenville County: Bishops Mills – 200 m around the
County Road 18/Mill St. intersection, 44.87246° N 75.70096° W). These
caterpillars are called “winter cutworms,” and are deplored on the
internet for their willingness to feed on a wide variety of plants in
the cooler seasons of the year. At first we just called them “hairless
caterpillars,” but Bev Wigney pointed out their identity to us.
In 2012 we once had one on the streets, saw them twice in 2013 & 2014,
and things took off in 2015 with 17, and 2016 with 20 sightings, before
the decline set in with 8 in 2017, 9 in 2018, 2 in 2019, 7 in 2020,
twice each year in 2021-2023, once in 2024, and one this year. This
represented a total of 76 surveys when the caterpillars were seen, and
178 caterpillars. The highest count was 11 November 2016, streets dry,
15, all dead-on-road, “5 small ones on County Road 18 at Pipers House, 4
at Rolands, 2 at Rolands Lawn, 1 on Mill St at Intersection, and 3 just
past the NW end of the transect on Mill St. Most reduced to fresh green
splats, so they must have moved recently.”
The “fresh green splats” were characteristic, and a sign of late fall
feeding. Fifty-nine of the 76 sightings were in November and December,
10 in October, 3 in the winter (January & February), and only 7 in the
rest of the year. None were on the streets when air temperature was
below freezing, one at 0° C, 33 between 2° C and 5° C, another 33
between 5° C and 9° C, and 8 above this to a maximum of 19° C.
The caterpillars are said to tolerate sub-freezing temperatures, but not
to be freeze-tolerant. Our coldest encounter was at night on 22 December
2023, -8°C, clear hazy sky with Beaufort light air, during a Mudpuppy
Night in Oxford Mills, when a 3 cm caterpillar was found still, as if
frozen, on the road and was released “around the parkinglot after it had
revived in Aleta's hand.”
Google’s AI gets quite huffy if you ask about declines of this species
in Canada, but they clearly have declined here. Weather was quite
variable in the years of the decline, but perhaps the population
succumbed to Tachinid Flies or Ichneumon Wasps which are known to
parasitize them. Since we only saw ones that were out on the streets
we’d have been unlike to see parasitized caterpillars, even if we had
known to look for this.
With the lax behaviour of the Polar Vortex giving us a crisply white
Christmas in 2025, we’ll have to wait for a January thaw to see if any
started off during the long summer drought, and probably until the fall
of 2026 to see if the population has revived.
16 December 2021 (Bishops Mills intersection streets) TIME: 0605-0615.
AIR TEMP: 8°C, overcast, calm, Beaufort light breeze, predawn. OBSERVER:
Frederick W. Schueler. 2021/332/f, Noctua pronuba (Large Yellow
Underwing). 1 larva, alive on road, song. ca 40 mm, brown, on County
Road 18 at Trailer Slot, streets wet. Chunks of road salt from last
night persisting, 2.5 mm in rain gauge – onset of going-to-work traffic.
Noctua pronuba, winter grassy chewer,
Wander the salty roads of January.
A niche left vacant by our native fauna
Chlorophyll roadkill on County Road 18.
--
------------------------------------------------------------
---------Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad ------------ Fragile
Inheritance Natural History - https://fragileinheritance.ca/ 6
St-Lawrence Street Bishops Mills, RR#2 Oxford Station, Ontario K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44.87156° N 75.70095° W
------------------------------------------------------------
Here's a draft for resuming posting at our -
http://www.doingnaturalhistory.com/ - blog. Aleta thinks it's weird to
start with the Green Christmas song, and I wonder what experience others
have had with Noctua pronuba, so if there are opinions or data on these
questions...
fred.
====================================================
Green Splats of Christmas
In 2023, Andy Fyon noted - “it has been a green Christmas in Ottawa.
Temp is +1° C and headed to +3° C with showers today,” and this required
an update to a popular Christmas song –
I'm dreaming of a green Christmas
when photosynthesis goes on,
When pronuba nibbles, and parliaments quibble
promoting oily profits' song.
I'm dreaming of a green Christmas
With every lobbyist who's paid
To strain his tonsils to promote fossils
in horrid braying carol strains...
I'm dreaming of a green Christmas
With Crocodyles on Baffin's Isle
Where greenhouse gasses, we sing, surpasses
The Eocene that's back in style.
While it’s well known that fossil fuel lobbyists work to promote the
heat death of civilization, and that with the high carbon dioxide
concentrations of the Eocene, what are now tropical creatures throve in
what is now the Canadian Arctic, the hibernal nibbling of larval Noctua
pronuba is a less well known phenomenon, and at the time I did not
anticipate how much less conspicuous it was to become in a couple of years.
Noctua pronuba, the Large Yellow Underwing Moth, is a widespread species
in Eurasia, which showed up in Nova Scotia around 1979, and has now
spread across North America to Mexico and Alaska. While we’ve never seen
an adult in Bishops Mills, caterpillars subsequently recognized as this
species first showed up in 2012 on our doing-the-streets transect
(Canada: Ontario: Grenville County: Bishops Mills – 200 m around the
County Road 18/Mill St. intersection, 44.87246° N 75.70096° W). These
caterpillars are called “winter cutworms,” and are deplored on the
internet for their willingness to feed on a wide variety of plants in
the cooler seasons of the year. At first we just called them “hairless
caterpillars,” but Bev Wigney pointed out their identity to us.
In 2012 we once had one on the streets, saw them twice in 2013 & 2014,
and things took off in 2015 with 17, and 2016 with 20 sightings, before
the decline set in with 8 in 2017, 9 in 2018, 2 in 2019, 7 in 2020,
twice each year in 2021-2023, once in 2024, and one this year. This
represented a total of 76 surveys when the caterpillars were seen, and
178 caterpillars. The highest count was 11 November 2016, streets dry,
15, all dead-on-road, “5 small ones on County Road 18 at Pipers House, 4
at Rolands, 2 at Rolands Lawn, 1 on Mill St at Intersection, and 3 just
past the NW end of the transect on Mill St. Most reduced to fresh green
splats, so they must have moved recently.”
The “fresh green splats” were characteristic, and a sign of late fall
feeding. Fifty-nine of the 76 sightings were in November and December,
10 in October, 3 in the winter (January & February), and only 7 in the
rest of the year. None were on the streets when air temperature was
below freezing, one at 0° C, 33 between 2° C and 5° C, another 33
between 5° C and 9° C, and 8 above this to a maximum of 19° C.
The caterpillars are said to tolerate sub-freezing temperatures, but not
to be freeze-tolerant. Our coldest encounter was at night on 22 December
2023, -8°C, clear hazy sky with Beaufort light air, during a Mudpuppy
Night in Oxford Mills, when a 3 cm caterpillar was found still, as if
frozen, on the road and was released “around the parkinglot after it had
revived in Aleta's hand.”
Google’s AI gets quite huffy if you ask about declines of this species
in Canada, but they clearly have declined here. Weather was quite
variable in the years of the decline, but perhaps the population
succumbed to Tachinid Flies or Ichneumon Wasps which are known to
parasitize them. Since we only saw ones that were out on the streets
we’d have been unlike to see parasitized caterpillars, even if we had
known to look for this.
With the lax behaviour of the Polar Vortex giving us a crisply white
Christmas in 2025, we’ll have to wait for a January thaw to see if any
started off during the long summer drought, and probably until the fall
of 2026 to see if the population has revived.
16 December 2021 (Bishops Mills intersection streets) TIME: 0605-0615.
AIR TEMP: 8°C, overcast, calm, Beaufort light breeze, predawn. OBSERVER:
Frederick W. Schueler. 2021/332/f, Noctua pronuba (Large Yellow
Underwing). 1 larva, alive on road, song. ca 40 mm, brown, on County
Road 18 at Trailer Slot, streets wet. Chunks of road salt from last
night persisting, 2.5 mm in rain gauge – onset of going-to-work traffic.
Noctua pronuba, winter grassy chewer,
Wander the salty roads of January.
A niche left vacant by our native fauna
Chlorophyll roadkill on County Road 18.
--
------------------------------------------------------------
---------Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad ------------ Fragile
Inheritance Natural History - https://fragileinheritance.ca/ 6
St-Lawrence Street Bishops Mills, RR#2 Oxford Station, Ontario K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44.87156° N 75.70095° W
------------------------------------------------------------
Bev Wigney
Dec 27, 2025, 12:38:07 PM12/27/25
to natur...@googlegroups.com, Frederick W. Schueler
Fred and all,
I don't know if this will be a help, but iNaturalist shows 7,872 observations of Noctua pronuba in Ontario. These were submitted by 2,132 observers. I've asked it to show me a list of observations ordered by most recent date. I'm not sure if you can see this if not logged into iNaturalist, but here is a link that should take you to the list.
When I change the list to produce only observations for Leeds & Grenville Counties, the number of observations drops to 334.
I find that I don't see the caterpillars here as often as I did in Ontario, but I suspect that has to do with the lack of snow here in Nova Scotia. We used to find them out and about on snowy country lanes when we lived in Ontario. Here, they would be lost in the leaves. I do still see the adults fairly often at my moth lamps in summer.
As for the blog -- I see nothing wrong with this post to re-energize the blog.
bev
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