I found this beautiful moth after a heavy rainstorm the morning of Sunday, May 26. It was helpless, lying in some grass with tattered wings.

The spicebush silkmoth is about the size of a large butterfly. It lives in trees and bushes. The one you see here is a female. Males are much darker. The spicebush silkmoth is called a silkmoth because it spins a cocoon of silk around a curled leaf and attaches it to a small limb in a tree for winter.

This moth is also called callosamia promethea. There are well more than 1,000 moths in its family of similar moths. Its distribution ranges over approximately the eastern one third of the United States.