I never saw them in Madison as a kid. Then they started showing up in the mid-90s.
Pretty much- the house was around 200 metres on the English side of the Welsh border, though not much Welsh was actually spoken there by that point. I don’t think crunchy bats is from Welsh though, not enough 'l’s.
Could be a corruption of ‘bits’? Crunchy bits sounds believable as a kids’ name for them.
Carpenter bees are pretty cool. Especially while hovering and defending their turf from other bees or me. You can just see them watching you as you move around. All buzz and no bite (sting), as far as I know.
Everyone in the US (that I know) calls them Roly Pollies. (ROLE-ee POLE-ees).
As a kid my friends and I called them Doodly bugs.
Went to wash up in my laundry room sink, and there was a huge wolf spider, easily 3" across, in it.
It took me awhile to get him onto a paint stir stick to relocate him outside.
I woke up this morning to the cats simultaneously fascinated and terrified by something on the window sill. It was a Luna moth, and I rescued it before someone became bold enough to give it a taste. This one was a bit battered, I was pretty happy to see it because I go years at a time between seeing them.
We have an old white cedar or cape violet tree. They are poisonous to almost everything except the caterpillar of the White Cedar moth (Leptocneria reducta). They are literally and metaphorically irritating (people are allergic to them) horrible little bastards but also really quite fascinating
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they have an interesting daily cycle. They “roost” at and around the base of the tree during the day, including in the cracks and folds of the bark. At dusk they swarm up the tree in a mass so thick that at their peak it looks like the whole surface of the lower part of the tree is moving. At dawn they all come down and hide.
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they seem to be able to detect a white cedar tree and travel to it from surprising distances. They move with amazing pace. I guess the reality is they aren’t moving at more than a fraction of a mile an hour but they do so with such unswerving steadiness that it’s surprising what distance they will cover before you know it.
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to describe them as numerous doesn’t even begin to give you the picture. I have found a way to control them but before I did we would kill several thousand in an evening for several days running and make no appreciable dent in their numbers. They would strip every single leaf off our really quite large tree in a matter of a week.
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when they are full size they find somewhere to cocoon ready to become a moth. They consider suitable places to be; your underwear drawer; the engine bay of your car; storage boxes; the interior of whitegoods; kitchen cupboards etc
The funny thing is that having now controlled them I kind of miss them. They were quite characterful.