kaiju big battel . . . in my backyard?

what are these?! from far away, they look like tiny scottie dogs wearing warming blankets, but from up close . . . they are like a 3-eyed spikey dragons with giant nostrils and little fangs?! adam made the mistake of brushing his arm against one, and his arm felt like it had been dragged through nettles. so, poisonous, to boot. these guys look like a japanese horror movie in the making.

"danger can happen!"

UPDATE: a friend of my mother-in-law had this to say, "this is the so-called saddleback caterpillar, which has perhaps the most potent sting of any in North America --- like an intense bout with stinging nettle. It is the immature form of a brown moth, Acharia stimulea (family Limacodidae) thatoccurs widely over the eastern US; the caterpillars feed on all sorts of garden and native plants. We do not have anything like it on the West Coast, although we have other, unrelated stinging cateropillars.