A brand new butterfly

Apparently I had missed a cocoon in some of the evergreen milkweed, because this morning I found a butterfly at the base of the bush, wings still too wet to fly. It had just hatched, or eclosed (a new word I learned to describe when a butterfly leaves the chrysalis).


I looked around and soon found the remains of the chrysalis higher up. I broke off the leaf  so I could get a really good photo.


And then it was time to wait and watch. I found the butterfly about 8:45 am and watched it until it flew away a bit before 10 am. I took several videos. The first is mostly it just clinging to the leaves while the morning breeze moves it around.

(Since uploading the video is not working, let's try this URL: https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipP1GoQBjKKd6sw-M3vLn61EH-hwrqvmkPukrkgl)




As the sun reached it around 9:45, the butterfly began to flap its wings, testing them out. Then it took a first little flight and landed on a wood chip. I picked up the wood chip it was sitting on to get a closer look. It flew from the wood to my tshirt for a few moments, then as I tried to put it back on the wood chip, it finally flew away for good.

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipNdubnuU4YD8xAk7LS-g9WKUKd0wM_yAu3CmED2


Comments

  1. tkleinJuly 7, 2017 at 8:26 PM

    Hmm, videos aren't showing for me. Let me know if you see them or not!

    ReplyDelete
  2. tkleinJuly 21, 2017 at 9:37 PM

    Tried another method to get the videos up, and it failed too. Still working on it!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Other garden inhabitants: Insects

Image
First I must say I am not much of an entomologist, so I am not even going to try to nail down the species of insects (and arthropods) I have seen. But unsurprisingly, as I began watering the butterfly garden every day, I began to see more and more insects. The first ones were beetles, many of which resembled cockroaches, and ants. Ants are everywhere! In this first picture you can see some beetles that some other creature ripped the heads from and devoured. Isn't nature a beautiful thing? And then I began to see more and more predators, like crickets, spiders, and mantises. The most spectacular insect we have is a tarantula hawk. These are HUGE wasps with black bodies and orange wings. Their sting is apparently VERY painful, but luckily they are hard to get angry and most of the time they are just eating nectar from flowers like bees. However, I also watched one investigate a burrow in the garden, presumably looking for a tarantula. Female tarantula hawks will p...
Read more

One caterpillar to go

Image
June 16, 2017. We still have a caterpillar eating away at the milkweed before it can form a chrysalis. I watered everything deeply before taking off to the Grand Canyon for the weekend with some family visiting from Iceland.
Read more

Water

Image
One of the purposes of this garden is to capture and use rainwater, not only that which falls from the sky but also that caught by the large cisterns we have on campus. The cisterns have been there for years but no one has ever made good use of the water until now (as far as I know). There are two cisterns close to the butterfly garden, and both were about half full at the beginning of June when I started using them. If you place your hand on the side of the cistern, you can feel a temperature difference where the water is. In the hot afternoons when bright sunlight is shining on it, the metal feels cooler where the water is. In the mornings, it feels warmer. The water level is now about a foot above the concrete platform, and the water pressure is lessening. I really hope we get some good thunderstorms soon! Then we can see how the garden works at collecting water in the basins, and we can get more water into the cisterns from the roofs.
Read more