Hemaris means `bloody nose.’ `Bloody nose’ on account of the red first noticed on the face, though some writers called them ‘Clear wings,’ because of the transparent spaces on the wings.  Certainly `clear wings’ is a most appropriate and poetic name for this moth.  Fastidious people will undoubtedly prefer it for common usage.  For myself, I always think of the delicate, gaudy little creature, greedily thrusting its blood-red nose into the purple thistle blooms; so to my thought it returns as `bloody nose.’

The pairs mate early after emerging, and lay about two hundred small eggs to the female, from which the caterpillars soon hatch, and begin their succession of moults.  One writer gave black haw and snowball as their favourite foods, and the length of the caterpillar when full grown nearly two inches.  They are either a light brown with yellow markings, or green with yellow; all of them have white granules on the body, and a blue-black horn with a yellow base.  They spin among the leaves on the ground, and the pupa, while small, is shaped like Regalis, except that it has a sharper point at each end, and more prominent wing shields.  It has no raised tongue case, although it belongs to the family of `long tongues.’

On learning all I could acquire by experience with these moths, and what the books had to teach, I became their warm admirer.  One sunny morning climbing the hill on the way to the cardinals, with fresh plates in my cameras, and high hopes in my heart, I passed an unsuually large fine thistle, with half a dozen Thysbe moths fluttering over it as if nearly crazed with fragrance, or honey they were sipping.

“Come here!  Come here!  Come here!” intoned the cardinal, from the sycamore of Rainbow Bottom.

“Just you wait a second, old fellow!” I heard myself answering.  Scarcely realizing what I was doing, the tripod was set up, the best camera taken out, and focused on that thistle head.  The moths paid no attention to bees, butterflies, or humming-birds visiting the thistle, but this was too formidable, and by the time the choicest heads were in focus, all the little red fellows had darted to another plant.  If the camera was moved there, they would change again, so I sat in the shade of a clump of papaws to wait and see if they would not grow accustomed to it.

They kept me longer than I had expected, and the chances are I would have answered the cardinal’s call, and gone to the river, had it not been for the interest found in watching a beautiful grey squirrel that homed in an ivy-covered stump in the pasture.  He seemed to have much business on the fence at the hilltop, and raced back and forth to it repeatedly.  He carried something, I could not always tell what, but at times it was green haws.  Once he came with no food, and at such a headlong run that he almost turned somersaults as he scampered up the tree.