Squee!

At the Wildlife Center of Virginia for my usual Friday volunteering day - and we're sort of standing around mostly finished with the morning's treatments - when in comes the rehab intern saying "Look what I found outside near the pond!!! It's the cutest thing!" We felt it was likely a swallowtail caterpillar of some sort, so I deployed my iNaturalist app and we determined that it was spicebush swallowtail butterfly caterpillar. And I subsequently googled it and determined that it's the final instar. So it is now back outside and hopefully going to turn itself into a butterfly shortly.

But have you ever seen anything so adorable? Of course, those aren't really eyes. And they're supposed to be scary to deter predators. But they make humans go "SQUEE!!!!" because we just love things with big eyes...