A peculiar thing appeared in my back yard recently—a carefully crafted globe-shaped object created from the top of a fern frond stitched neatly into a shelter with silken strands. A true work of art, by nature’s standards, and a front-runner candidate for this column. A fern ball had emerged and presented its perplexing package of mysteries to be mined.

Actually, there were two; the second was even more of a masterpiece, as its maker had artfully captured two ferns and managed to weave them together.

Hidden inside the artful sculpture was the artist—the caterpillar of a leaftier or leafroller moth. I decided not to disturb the inhabitant, a cream or green-colored caterpillar that has figured out how to pull together the tips of fern fronds to create a compact shelter in which it remains while consuming the inner foliage. It leaves behind the signs of its presence in the form of frass (insect droppings) before pupating into a light tan colored moth with wings bearing delicate wavy brown lines.

The vacated balls provide recycled shelter for other invertebrates trying to weather life in the wild. I waited until the fern ball was empty, then carefully pried it open to observe what was inside—frass and several small insects.

Several photos later, the fern balls were on their way to fame in the Upper Delaware River region’s finest newspaper, the River Reporter, where we like to keep our readers informed of the endless wonders of the natural world. ☺