A new breakfast cereal?

A few weeks ago I heard what sounded like raindrops falling from the Coast Live Oak in front of the house. Didn't think much more of it until a week later, when I noticed it all piling up on the ground. "It" being what you see in the picture.

No, it is not a new breakfast cereal. It's known as "frass", which is another word for "feces". Poop that is. Lots and lots of caterpillar poop. Turns out it's an infestation of the Oak Moth. Below are the caterpillars of said moth.

The tree is nearly bare now, having had its leaves converted to poop pellets. When I took the caterpillar picture above, there were literally hundreds coming down, like it was a caterpillar highway. They climb down, or just drop out of the tree onto you, your car, and whatever birds happen to be passing underneath. Then they find some nice safe place to form the chrysalis.

My house was covered with them the following week. Somehow, they also found their way inside the house. The ceiling is covered with them. And they are hatching, so I also have a couple hundred moths flying about the place. The spiders are doing their best, but there are too many. I'll wait for them to die and just vacuum them all up. In the meantime, those of you with flying bug phobias should stay away. The trees will recover, by the way. This is a cyclical pattern, with some years worse than others. On the bright side, if there is a drought, the oaks will probably be better off as they have no leaves from which to lose moisture.

In bird news, there is an interesting and unexpected outcome to the Embden/African hybrid geese experiment: they are sex-linked, meaning you can determine gender by color. Embden's can be sex-linked for the first week after birth, but when full grown they are the same -- all white. Africans are not identifiable by color at any time. But the offspring of the female Embden and male African are easily identifiable. Males are larger than both parents, and grey/white. Here is mother dressed in white in the background, and son in the foreground:

The females are smaller than both parents, and brown, more like their father. Here is daughter in the background, father in the foreground:

To forestall those who might say yes you can determine gender of adult Embdens and Africans, there is no argument there. The males of both breeds are bigger than the females. There are also some differences in their voices.