Caterpillar I.D. – Variegated Fritillary

We found a lot of these caterpillars on our pansies near the end of June. They were really enjoying their meal on our flowers! They are red and white striped with black spikes on them. We killed most of them so they wouldn’t eat all our flowers but kept a couple to try to raise. They did ok and one made it’s chrysalis which was a very pretty silver color, but unfortunately it didn’t make it for some reason and never emerged. Here’s a pic of our caterpillar.

Our collection of variegated fritillary caterpillars from our pansies

close-up of one we kept

Here’s what it would have turned into!

Viceroy Emerges!

It took only about a week for the viceroy butterfly we had to emerge from it’s chrysalis (see chrysalis in blog below)! Hereis a pic we took of it before we released it.

 
Viceroy butterfly in our butterfly container with monarch caterpillars in the background

Caterpillar I.D. – Viceroy

A couple of weeks ago we found this cool brown and green, bumpy, odd-shaped caterpillar on some young trees along the road in our town. I think they were on poplar or birch trees. We brought it home and fed it some leaves of the tree it was on. Unfortunately I didn’t get a pic of our caterpillar, but this it what it looked like.

It was only a few days later that it made it’s chrysalis. Here’s a pic of the chrysalis that we have right now.

 These caterpillars look much like monarchs, but when they fly instead of gliding between wing strokes like monarchs, they  flap their wings quickly the whole time they fly. Other animals who won’t eat monarchs are fooled by their appearance and don’t eat them.

Like monarch caterpillars, they pupate for close to 2 weeks before emerging. Once the butterfly emerges they mate and lay eggs and the caterpillars eat and then overwinter as a caterpillar in hibernation. Then in the spring / early summer they eat some more before pupating. I think it’s been about one week since this chrysalis made so I’ll post an update when the butterfly emerges!

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!

 

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

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!)

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!