WONDERS OF MIMICRY

Imagine an eye appears, sudden and near, just centimeters from the edge of your world, in the hush of a plantation.
Not fully seen, part cloaked in shadow, part blur, roundish, rippling with hidden color, and it moves - perhaps.

You pause, just a sliver of a second to wonder: Is this the gaze of prey?
Or the hunger of something greater? But such questions cost lives. Ask once, ask too long, and find yourself swallowed by a decision delayed. The wise flee. To linger is to become a lesson carved in feathers and silence.

A few heartbeats and meters away,
do you return? To peer again?
To wonder if it was a meal after all?
No. And neither do the raptors.

Xylophanes tersa - the tersa sphinx, not merely a moth, but a magician of illusion, a whisper of leaf and wing and shadow.

Its form, a mimic’s triumph: not just survival, but artistry, the captured threat of an eye, a predator’s presence carved into flesh to turn fear into safety.

And that mimicry so exact, so strange -
is something remarkable. Nature, ever clever, subtle, and sometimes startlingly beautiful.