Caught a Whopper

I was outside last night just after dark with my front porch light on and this huge thing flew past me and landed on the house just under the light bulb. It was a moth. This thing was twice as big as the butterfly that is on my hand in the last post. The board this thing is sitting on is a 1"x 4". Just to give you an idea of how big this one is.

It took a while as there are hundreds of thousands of moths, but I was lucky enough to find the species of moth I have to identify. Are you ready for this...... right now in my freezer is a Black Witch or it's scientific name of Ascalapha Odorata. This particular specimen is a female. You can tell by the white line crossing all four wings. The male has a dark line.

A tidbit of info from Wikipedia... The noctuid moth Ascalapha odorata bears the common name Black Witch. It is a harbinger of death in Mexican and Caribbean folklore. In Spanish it is known as "Mariposa de la muerte" (Mexico & Costa Rica)[1], or "Pirpinto de la Yeta" (Argentina); in Nahuatl (Mexico) it is "Miquipapalotl" or "Tepanpapalotl" (miqui = death, black + papalotl = moth);