The girls received an Insect Lore butterfly garden for Christmas. I thought it would be a fun thing for them to do in the apartment, which then turned into an ‘after our move’ kind of thing. Suddenly, it was after our move and I uncovered the butterfly garden while cleaning out some toys and decided, it was time. We put in our order for our free batch of caterpillars and waited.
The box of butterflies arrived while we were in San Antonio visiting SeaWorld, but luckily, they didn’t cook in our metal box and we weren’t left with a stinky mess of butterfly death. We carefully opened our box and found our cup of caterpillars, blissfully unaware of their near-death experience. Our kit instructed us to leave the cup alone and wait as our caterpillars turned into chrysalises.
Just as our instructions predicted about a week later, they all crawled up to the lid and formed their chrysalis. Once we’d given them a couple of days to firm up, I carefully removed the paper disc they were attached to and pinned it to the side of our butterfly garden. And we waited. If we bothered the butterfly garden, the chrysalises would shake and shimmy for several minutes. It almost made us want to bother them more, just to see how long they would shake, but we resisted the urge to torment our growing butterflies.
Lily appears to have full confidence in our butterfly growing skills, Ella, not so much.
One day, about a week later, I was walking through the room and noticed movement from the corner of my eye. Sure enough, our first butterfly had emerged, two others followed that day and by the next day, all five butterflies were out and flapping. This winged commotion was too much for Zucchini who wanted to torment the poor butterflies even more than I did. One morning we found the garden on the ground, so the butterflies were moved to the girls’ room for safety overnights. Each night the girls would say goodnight to their butterflies. We went on walks to collect bright flowers for them and dropped sugar water on the petals for the butterflies to drink. The girls called it “connector” rather than nectar.
Butterfly enemy #1
We kept our five fluttery friends for a week before setting them free. The Saturday we chose to release them happened to be the morning that Loran sprayed the outside of our house with insecticide/scorpion spray. We decided to bring them down to the model home to release them, rather than have to deal with five dead butterfly bodies littering our yard, imagine explaining that…
It also happened to be the day of record breaking 108 degree heat. Our butterflies went from their climate controlled home that stayed reliably between 74 and 80 degrees, protected by mesh from their cat predator; to released into the wild on an oppressively hot and sunny day. Surprisingly, they didn’t spontaneously combust when released.
The girls were happy to try to shake them out of their habitat, but wanted nothing to do with actually touching them. To save them from traumatic brain injury from ‘shaken butterfly syndrome’, I intervened and got the fragile Painted Ladies from their habitat. Once out in the open air, they took off with little hesitation and were off in the free world.
Our neighborhood has been working with the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center to plant native wildflowers in the neighborhood common space to attract butterflies and birds. I hope our butterflies found those beautiful flowers and are out enjoying their freedom, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if they landed on a rock and burst into flames on that hot day. Either way, we’ll never know, so I choose to believe the butterflies we see fluttering about are the ones we raised.
Our other source of fluttery entertainment comes in the form of hummingbirds who visit our newly installed hummingbird feeder almost constantly. Perhaps it ages me, but I’d like to think it really just keeps me humble to enjoy the majesty of nature, but I really love watching those little birds float in the air. The rest of my family seems to enjoy them in passing and mildly tolerates me pointing out several times a day that the hummingbird is outside. I’m sure my AARP card will be arriving in the mail any day now.
These beauties beat some of the other creatures we’ve encountered…
Dead scorpion (better than his cousin, live scorpion), Mr. Treefrog – whom we appreciate, but gave me quite the scare when he was sitting on the doorknob that I put my hand on to pull shut, and giant stick bug who isn’t threatening and pretty neat.
We also have insects that look like leaves that are interesting and giant centipedes that we’ve seen only once, but it was attempting to drop on Loran’s head when we were getting the mail, so now I’m on alert every time we’re at the mailbox, because those guys sting. Plus fire ants, but I’m good at getting rid of those now, so they aren’t as scary.
I shall leave you with the giant centipede (photo from the internet). Sweet dreams.
Just kidding, here’s a a cute photo of Lily sleeping while hugging a bag of ranch chips!
No comments:
Post a Comment