Monarchs – caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly!

Each summer we love to find the monarch caterpillars or eggs and raise them to butterflies. This year we have an abundance of milkweed in and around our yard. We’ve raised about 10 caterpillars. Right now all of our caterpillars have either become butterflies or are chrysalises. I thought the pic above was cool as it shows 3 of the 4 stages of a monarch’s life! What an amazing transformation they go through in such a short time! My kids love to watch it all and I have to keep trying to limit the # of caterpillars brought in! They get so excited to watch them fly away. Here’s some pics of them releasing their butteflies!

I love this pic of this butterfly’s first flight!

 

Latest Cecropia Moth Caterpillar Pics – later instar

We’ve been raising cecropia moths this summer. I have former entries that show how they’ve changed from small black caterpillars to yellow and black caterpillars to adding some orange tubercles on them. Now they have some incredible colors on them! I love these pics – my ds did a watercolor painting of them for his nature notebook and it looked very colorful and beautiful! It is so neat watching the changes these caterpillars make! Enjoy!

Side view of a caterpillar. I love watching them walk – their feet look like they’re doing the wave!

Top View – shows how the middle has turned almost a blue/green color with the head being more green. I think their tubercles are so pretty!

Insect I.D. – Ebony Jewelwing Damselfly

Our family enjoys canoeing on a river nearby here. Recently when canoeing we have seen huge numbers of damselflies that have black wings and bright blue / green bodies. These damselflies fly with more a flitting appearance and are all over fallen trees, branches and brush in the river or on the edge of the river. It is beautiful to see them flitting all over!

In reading about these damselflies I learned that they live in shady river areas and like to perch on fallen branches and logs. They then fly out to eat tiny insects before returning to perch. They lay eggs inside soft stems of plants just below the surface of the water. The eggs hatch out into larvae called naiads who overwinter in this state and then climb out of the water, split their skins (molt) and become a damselfly the next year.

Butterfly I.D. – European Skipper

Yesterday I posted about the orange and the yellow hawkweeds. Today I found the answer to what butterflies were swarming all around the hawkweeds (and our clover in our yard as well). They are European Skippers. Unfortunately they’re a pest of farmers as their larvae are raised on Timothy grass and can hurt their hay production.

They overwinter as an egg, then hatch out in spring. They then roll themselves up in leaves and seal the leaves with silk webbing. They grow until late June when they make chrysalids on the bottom-side of weeds or leaves. In about 2 weeks they emerge as butterflies.

Here’s a pic of the European Skipper

Wildflower I.D. – Orange Hawkweed and Yellow Hawkweed

I have enjoyed seeing orange hawkweed and was all excited to take some great pics.

I also saw a yellow flower today when out on a nature walk and took pics and decided it’s a yellow hawkweed.

They were attracting a ton of butterflies to them. I e-mailed the e-naturalist to try to figure out what these butterflies are – they’re tiny and they’re everywhere right now! Check out www.enaturalist.org if you have something you’re having trouble identifying!

I was excited about all of this and then I decided to read about these plants on the web today. I found out that both of these are invasive species and are considered very undesirable. Personally, I think they’re beautiful! So if it’s invasive but beautiful is that bad? Of course, normally in life, the beautiful plants that you want, you can’t get to grow, but only the weeds that you don’t want. So maybe this is a weed and invasive, but if I think it’s beautiful, maybe there’s actually an easy-to-grow pretty flower!

Then again, dandelions are pretty until their seed heads come out. There are many weeds that are pretty at times. Well, time will tell whether I like having this plant around or not. There aren’t many in my yard – yet….

P.S. – can you count how many butterflies are in the pic above?

Our Monarch Chrysalises

We currently have 10 monarch chrysalises! We’ve been raising monarch caterpillars that we found on milkweed near our house. We still have one caterpillar left. I keep telling my kids to stop getting more caterpillars – wait until these become butterflies! Here are a couple of pics to enjoy!

The last of our caterpillars

I love this pic – shows a couple of chrysalises with the orange wings just starting to show through and with my son (who loves these caterpillars) in the background looking down on them (wearing his bug PJ’s!)

Cecropia Caterpillar Changes

Cecropia Caterpillar on June 15, 2007

It’s been really neat to watch these caterpillars change and grow! When they hatched they were 1/4″ long and were black. Then they changed to being yellow and black. It was interesting – as they first shed their skins, they would be a bright yellow, but the yellow would fade some after a while. They were then yellow with black spines sticking up. The caterpillars in the pic below that are yellow are ones who have just molted and look very yellow.

 

After this, they then got their orange tubercles sticking up in the front. In the picture below you can see a yellow caterpillar with 2 sets of orange tubercles. They have now been turning more of green / blue-green and still have their 2 sets of orange tubercles. They almost seem to have some blue tubercles coming out of the sides near their heads. They are really cool looking right now!

We have been feeding some lilac leaves, and others apple leaves. They do eat lilac leaves, but the few that we have eating lilac leaves are way behind size-wise to the ones eating apple leaves. We still have over 30 caterpillars eating apple leaves but as they eat more and more leaves, we’re slowly releasing them onto the tree as we can’t care for too many now that they’re eating so much! It’s been very neat seeing these caterpillars and all their changes!

Butterfly I.D. – some kind of Skipper butterfly?

I need a good butterfly guidebook! From looking on the web, I’m guessing this is in the Skipper family, but there are so many yellow skipper butterflies, I had a hard time finding out which one. Most of them don’t have black bodies with the yellow. Anyways, here’s my pic for the day!

Wildflower I.D. – Yellow Wood Sorrell

 

I found this delicate little flower next to our driveway. I thought it was just the prettiest little flower with it’s heart-shaped leaves and dainty little yellow flower.

 

Here’s my first attempt at Haiku poetry with this flower!

 

Hearts abound

Beneath dainty curves

Yellow Wood Sorrell

Wildflower I.D. – Fivefingers

I’m keeping track of the wildflowers I find and I.D. This we found last week on a nature walk. It was blooming along the edge of some woods. It’s called Fivefingers – a part of the cinquefoil family.