Entomologist, please help!
 

So I came over to girlfriend's and the house stank pretty badly. Skunks are often seen around here but this isn't that smell. Her dog puked on the floor and keeps drooling.

Then she finds a bird sitting on the dark corner of the living room. It's alive, eyes blinking but not very animate. I take a big piece of vinyl and try to cover it. The bird appears to be falling asleep, he doesn't mind me approaching at all and nods his head away. I catch the bird, and find this right next to it:

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i1...2/DSC00538.jpg

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i1...2/DSC00534.jpg

Whatever it is, it looks like it made the bird sick (pretty sure it's dead as it flew like a football when I threw it over the fence). Check out the "resting bird" shirt I'm wearing, what an irony:

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i1...2/DSC00532.jpg

...and it also made the dog sick. He wasn't barking at all at the bird, he's usually a very active dog.

Here's what my CSI-watcher sense tells me:
The poor bird caught this giant caterpillar. It flew into the house (back door was open) to find a place for itself, but the bug made it sick. Then the dog went to pick on the bird, and got a taste of the bug too. He got sick and puked. The dog learned his lesson and left the bird alone, while the bird was dying away. Now the people are feeling sick too.

So what the hell is this thing? I sucked it up with a vacuum cleaner because I really didn't wanna touch it. I mean, it killed the bird. It still stinks...

Heya Won

I'm replying to your question over in the 911 forum.

I thought your thing looked like a caterpillar, though the picture you posted of the hawk moth did look more like picture of the carnage.

The caterpillars are green, though they do turn brownish if they've been in a dog's stomach for a while. I guessed at tomato hornworm because it's a big caterpillar that I know will make a dog sick. Growing up, I had a hound dog that loved to snack on them, and trample the garden to get to them. Then a little later, it would puke it up on the deck and lug around moaning for the rest of the day. Being a hound dog, it had no capacity to learn, and would repeat the whole series several times a year.

Caterpillars are slow moving pieces of meat, so they have evolved a number of defenses. There are things like camoflage and eyespots to make them look more ferocious. But the ones that may apply in your case are storing toxins and emmiting a stink. Some caterpilllars make their own toxins, but more just tend to selectively store the natural plant defensive toxins, so that they concentrate them, and the typical predators like birds will avoid them. And some species give off a stink that causes predators to avoid them.

I'm not an entymologist, so I'm not claiming to identify the partially digested thing that you found, but it sure sounds like the bird and dog found a bad caterpillar.

Unless you have a hound dog, or something equally as stupid, I'd imagine that it learned a lesson. If you're worried that the dog developed a taste for your unsavory backyard fauna, , you can go looking at your plants, particularly at dusk or dawn, when it's cooler, and see if there is a lot of a type of caterpillar on your plants. A picture of a live one and checking out gardening sites could identify it, and then you can look at control options.

What kind of bird is that? It looks like a raven. Not a good omen in your house.