This Summer (2018) we felt lucky to see several Monarch butterflies in our yard, especially after spending several years of not seeing one at all.  We read about efforts to try and protect some of these butterflies so that they could continue to produce more offspring. We followed prescribed methods of taking care of any egg or caterpillar found prior to cold weather and so that butterflies had a chance to mate and/or migrate.

Here is a Monarch Butterfly egg we found on the back of a Milkweed leaf.

Eventually the butterfly egg started changing color, especially at the tip which was to become the caterpillar head.

Here the Monarch caterpillar emerged from the egg.

The very tiny caterpillar headed off to eat the Milkweed leaf right away.

One day old caterpillar is barely 3mm (1/8 inch) long.

 

The caterpillar just eats and eats and eats Milkweed leaves.  And poops a lot too!

As the caterpillar gets bigger his yellow, black, and white bandings are quite distinct.

Besides eating and pooping, the caterpillar takes just a few seconds to rest.

He/she was now a mature caterpillar.  Thank goodness, as we were almost running out of leaves on the Milkweed potted plant we had him on.

He/she moved away from the Milkweed plant. In this case, it climbed the wall of the container we kept him in, in order to protect him from wasps that eat young caterpillars. He chose the wall though we had other types of plants inside with him. He spun some silk thread to attach himself on one end of his body to the wall, and then got into a “J” position.

He began to crawl out of his caterpillar skin and his insides form a longish ball and chrysalis skin around him.

Here we can see the discarded caterpillar skin

The new chrysalis, complete with gold highlights was done in about 30 hours!

The chrysalis is waterproof and the thread holding it is quite sturdy– no amount of blowing wind or pouring rain would loosen it.

The chrysalis began to darken after a week’s time.

It became slightly transparent and we could see the formation of a butterfly wing inside.

Over the course of one day of seeing the butterfly wing pattern, the chrysalis was now transparent.

Here the chrysalis is about an hour away from releasing a butterfly.  It was pouring rain but nature was on course.

We missed seeing the folded wings butterfly emerge, but we found her here with wet wings still clinging to the remains of the transparent chrysalis.

The empty chrysalis still had the gold edging and spots on the outside including all of the raindrops from the downpour we had.

After much pumping of the wings to get blood flowing once the sun came out and the wings were dry…

…we had a butterfly ready to go out into the world!