The Butterfly Project

We successfully raised a monarch butterfly and we have the photos to prove it.  

I kept the milkweed that the caterpillar was eating in my kitchen windowsill.

When we first got it, it was teeny, tiny speck of a thing.  I'm surprised I even found it!  Sorry for the blur, but you can see it there in the innermost leaf of the milkweed in the photo above.

It grew so fast!  Every day it was visibly bigger.

A few times, the milkweed got wilty, so we picked a new sprig for it.

When it got to be almost as big as I thought it would get, I put the milkweed and caterpillar into this mesh laundry hamper.  I knew (from raising black swallowtails in previous years) that when it was ready to pupate, it would try to go away and find a place to hide. You rarely find a butterfly chrysalis in the wild because they are very good at hiding for that vulnerable phase of their existence.  The laundry hamper enclosed it enough to keep it where we could find it (although, when I bought the hamper, I thought it had a zipper top, and it turned out to have a partly open top.  I put a piece of cardboard over the opening to enclose it fully.)

It grew, and ate, and grew and ate...

Yes, we read Eric Carle's adorable book, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."

Then one day it suddenly left the milkweed for the first time ever.

Since it could not escape, it settled for a spot up in the corner.

Unfortunately we were not home when it went into the chrysalis.  We came home to see that where it had been hanging in a "J" shape, it was suddenly a beautiful, green jewel, and there was a rumpled little bit of caterpillar skin on the bottom of the hamper.

(As a note, we currently have another in the hamper and just today it went up into the top corner.  I am trying to watch more closely to see we can watch it and see how it wraps itself up.)

It was so difficult to get good photos with the obstruction of the hamper.

Ten days after it went into the chrysalis, I looked at it before I went to bed and the chrysalis had suddenly become very transparent and I could see the colors and shapes of the wings folded up inside.  I wish I could have gotten a picture, but there was no good light for photographing that part.

When we got up that next morning, the butterfly was hanging there, drying it's wings and we could see the empty, clear "package" it came from.

After a while it started to move around and open it's wings.  I could not get a good photo with it's wings open.  But we did some research and determined by it's wing coloring that it was a male.

I put some flowers in a vase into the hamper in hopes it would go for a snack.

But he only wanted to get out of there to try out those new wings!

So we took it outside and let it go.  I tried to put it on some echinacea flowers in my garden, but it took off so fast and was gone almost faster than we could follow.  We last saw it resting up in the maple tree, and then it was gone.

What I later realized that I failed to do was for us to draw it in our nature journals.  (I'm trying to work on nature journaling, but it is hard... the kids need so much help and are fussy about not being able to make things look "right" and I do not yet know how to help them over that...)  Maybe we will still get to that, but one way or another, the kids and I all loved watching it grow and change and we are enjoying the one that we have now as well.   It was a good summer "science" project!