The Butterflies are Back

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The dill patch looks beyond bad, all drying out and making seeds.  But there's just enough life in the patch to support our latest crop of butterflies, and I just don't have the heart to tear out the food source for these tiny friends of mine, merely for the looks of my yard.

I'll just have to wait until the tiniest ones grow big and fat and wander off to make their chyrsalises.

Meanwhile, if the need arises, I'll simply tell people the garden is a mess but there are treasures hidden inside it.

And I'll hope for the chance to see this little jewel all hatched out into a real live adult butterfly.

Garden Friends

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My mom e-mailed today to tell me it would have been her dad's birthday.  The photo she attached shows him kneeling in his garden, face turned up, cowboy had securely placed, surrounded by rows of good things to eat.

He died thirty-five years ago.  I'm not thirty-five yet, which means I never met him.

I do hear stories of how generous he was, both with money and garden produce.  I hear how he made soda water pancakes when everyone went camping (or at least got credit for them...it's hard to tell from the stories just how much help he really got from my grandma!).

And I hear about his garden.  How he grew enough corn to dry and grind for their own cornmeal--enough for a family of two parents, eight children, and who knows how many guests arriving who knows with how much notice.

That's a lot of corn meal.

I hear about how he bought ladybugs to come into the garden and eat the aphids.  I've been glad to see more ladybugs in the garden this year, but I haven't bought any. 

Unless you count the ladybug nail clippers and the ladybug squeeze toys I bought for my piano students, to remind them to clip their nails and curve their fingers.  But that's different.

I do think my grandfather and I would have been good friends.  Even if we wouldn't have had anything more than gardens in common.  Gardens, after all, can take up enough of life to be enough for a good bond.

And do you see who else came to the garden this spring?  They chose the right time this year, when the dill was big and I was already letting it go to seed.  We ended up with three little guys, as far as I could tell. 

In these photos, they're probably ready to run off and find somewhere to hang as chrysalises for a while, but I haven't figured out where they went to do that.  I hope they chose safe places.

I still can't get over their adorable stumpy feet.

You'll notice that the dill looks a bit beat up and ragged.  It has good reason to.  A week and half ago, my neighbor called to warn me that a bad storm was coming. 

My husband was home on lunch break, so we quickly shut the windows, gathered the littlest potted plants and put them under cover, and said a prayer for protection.

Then the hail started, with stones an inch and a half across.  It was like the sky was hurling ice cubes everywhere.  Some hit windows.  The hail lasted about five minutes, and in the end there wasn't significant damage, even in the garden--except for a few broken dill stems.

And we are grateful indeed.

Another Black Swallowtail Butterfly

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All summer long, we've left three or four little green chrysalises in a big glass jar on the back patio.  On the first day of school, a butterfly came out of one of them!  She was a little camera shy, but another butterfly emerged yesterday, and I was able to capture him while his wings were still a bit ruffled, before they were even ready for flight.

Four months ago, our caterpillars made their first chrysalises.  We had read that sometimes the butterflies will "overwinter" for sometimes several months, we thought we'd see just how long that would take.  In our case, it would really be "oversummering", since I suppose the butterflies wait to emerge until the heat has passed.

Two chrysalises remain--I'll have to let you know when they hatch!

Our Black Swallowtail Butterflies: A Timeline of Their Life Cycle

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Now that we've released three Black Swallowtail butterflies into the big wide world (and the second graders at school have released more than that), I thought it would be fun to look back over the time they've spent with us, and document the timeline from the egg discover to the first release.

We found the eggs and the first caterpillars on April 21, 2014.  (My post about it:  The Black Swallowtail Dilemma)

Since I read that only one in one hundred butterfly eggs makes it all the way to butterfly adulthood, we rescued the caterpillars from predators, sharing some with second grade and keeping a few protected at home.  We continued to watch their growth.  (My post about it:  Black Swallowtail Caterpillars)

It was more difficult than I expected to mark the transition between instar stages; we simply ended up enjoying watching them gradually change and grow.

By May 3, we had our first chrysalises.  Three were green, three were brown.  In the second grade classroom at school, my husband tells me the colors seemed to be location specific.  That is, all the green ones were on one type of terrain, and all the brown ones were on another.  (My post about it:  A Black Swallowtail Caterpillar Makes a Chrysalis {With Video})

On May 13, our first butterfly hatched!  From the day we found the first caterpillars and eggs, to the day of the first hatch, was three weeks and one day.  I let the beauty go out into the neighborhood on the morning of May 14.  (My post about it:  A Black Swallowtail Emerged)

So would we do it again?  Absolutely!  Even though it did end up ruining my best dill patch ever, the whole process has been a delight to watch.  In fact, we truly are doing this again.  The other day, my husband found the tiniest of caterpillars on a parsley plant out back, and we simply didn't have the heart to save the parsley.  Just one this time, so far, but he's already pretty fun to watch.

We'll try some more parsley and another dill patch come fall.

A Black Swallowtail Emerged

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I had no idea.  I spent the day catching up on (some of the) dishes, working on ScriptureTyper memory verses, and prepping the garden for a predicted two to four inches of rain.  The rains haven't come down so much that the floods started coming up, though, so it has been a pretty quiet day, severe weather warnings notwithstanding.  I was thinking the day had been progressing all along without fanfare.

EXCEPT.  One thing.

When my husband came home?  He took a look at the chrysalises, and found this beauty of a black male swallowtail already out in the world.

See the green chrysalis below him on the stick?  It shouldn't be long before we have five more of these gorgeous creatures.

I'm not one to buy clothes that only have the design going half way around them--a waist band only on the front, a pattern on one half of the sweater but not on the back, that kind of thing.  I guess that makes me enjoy that this guy has patterns on both sides of his wings all the more.

See how wide his wing span is?  Just about four inches--the wings in this photo are not quite open all the way.  It's just one of the most amazing things to see a chrysalis in its compact smallness, and imagine that only hours before this smooth-winged, large creature was somehow cramped up inside of it, and still came out so perfectly.

What a great thing to happen on a Tuesday, wouldn't you say?

A Black Swallowtail Catterpillar Makes a Chrysalis {With Video}

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We watch the little caterpillars eat whole leaves from the dill and parsley we feed them (we run out in the garden, so we buy more organic parsley from the grocery store).  They get fat quickly, and we can't seem to tire of of the way they search, find, and nibble the leaves, and repeat.  

I admit, I'm especially taken with their stumpy feet that hold on to anything while they bend and twist around with half their bodies or more looking for the next leafy victim.

Right before they make a chrysalis, the Black Swallowtail caterpillars are at their fattest yet, but they have to empty their digestive tract.  When they do so, they shrink a bit, and begin to wander.

Will this stick be the right hanging place?  Or will they search for another?  They wander to the very limit, and sometimes gravity carries them right back down to the bottom when they don't hold tightly enough to the last end of a branch.

They twist and turn, inspecting each potential chrysalis site with care.  Once satisfied (or at least more contained than they are when they try to roam all over creation), they settle on a place on the underside of a stick, attach with a string, and wait.  Within a day or so, without much warning, they make the chrysalis.  Which takes ten minutes or less, believe it or not.

Now, it's not much that will entice me to stay up late.  Not New Year's, not 4th of July fireworks (usually, anyway).  But that last look at the caterpillars, and finding one that just might be wiggly enough to make a chrysallis soon?  

That will absolutely keep me up until 1:00 a.m., especially when the second one starts the process right after the first one finishes.  And I will be unbelievably tired the next day (I don't sleep in well), but it will have been worth it all, just to have seen the miracle of a chrysalis in the making.

Due to technical difficulties, today's video will be posted on Google+ rather than directly in this blog post, and you can view it here.  It's about three minutes long, and I hope you enjoy watching this miracle as much as I did!  :)

Black Swallowtail Caterpillars

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This morning I gathered up extra food and extra vases, and carefully transferred most of the black swallowtail caterpillars to the new vases.  They were about to take their first ride in a vehicle.

You see, Mr. Second Grade Teacher was waiting for them at school, eager to let his students watch the life cycle unfold.  Sure enough, green branches with little things crawling on them were enough to capture the  students' curiosity, and within moments I was explaining to a wide-eyed youngster that these guys would turn into butterflies soon, holding out my fingers as I motioned, "THIS BIG!"

They've grown a lot in the last week, to be sure!  Soon I'll show you some more photos of the biggest ones.  You can't imagine how fascinating it is to watch one eat through a whole sprig of dill in a matter of minutes, clinging with some feet, using other feet to search out the juiciest leaves, twisting the whole body around to get the mouth around the newest morsel from the best angel.

The Black Swallowtail Dilemma

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 {Black Swallowtail Egg}

Remember that Black Swallowtail who sweetly visited my yard recently?  Yesterday, I figured out why.  (Looking back at that photo, I now see a hint of the dilemma to come, right there under my nose the whole time!!)  Here's what I wrote, in great distress, to my friend who loves butterflies and raised some herself one year. 

"We have a terrible dilemma on our hands.

"Our dill patch has been doing really well this spring.  I've been so excited about it, because I love dill, and it is hard to find it in the grocery stores.  I picture containers and containers full of my very own dried dill, to use in all my favorite things.

"And we have been delighted to notice a few black swallowtails visiting our yard.  Such beautiful butterflies!  Graceful creatures to be sure, with their yellow and blue spots lining their backs...

{Black Swallowtail Stage 1 Instars}

"Well, we found caterpillars on the dill plants today, and with a little help from Google, we've ascertained that dill plants are indeed a common egg host for black swallowtail butterflies, and the little guys on the leaves are indeed first-stage black swallowtail infants.

"Hence the dilemma.

"Do we sacrifice the dill, or the butterflies?!  Neither choice seems like the best one.  :(

"Perhaps you can lend your sympathy, even if you don't have advice."

{Displaced Black Swallowtail Stage 1 Instar}

Of course, we have several possible solutions to this dilemma.  We could save the dill at all costs, no matter what the cost to the butterfly world.  We could save the caterpillars, no matter what the cost to our garden.  We could bring them all--or some of them--inside, and feed them with store-bought parsley (their favorite host plants include carrots, dill, parsley, and the rue plant) until they mature.

Here's what I've done thus far.

1.  Take photos.  I might as well document the downfall of my best dill patch ever miracle of the butterflies.

2.  Displace a few of the hungry little infants to our parsley plants which are about to go to seed anyway, since we have seven more teenage parsley plants coming along nicely to replace them....hence saving a few of the dill leaves for us?  Maybe?

3.  Show the yellow eggs and the instars/caterpillars to my piano students.  Bonus education.

4.  Harvest as many dill leaves as I can find that don't already have eggs or infants on them (at least, as many as I can find before being devoured by mosquitoes).  Put them in the Garden Master dehydrator, and know that at least we'll enjoy a small part of the bounty.

5.  Order more dill seeds while Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds is offering free shipping for Earth Day.  We're almost out, and I was relying on this crop to replace my seed collection...but I don't know if I'll get any seeds post butterfly life cycle.

We still don't know for sure if we'll leave them all in the garden, or if we'll try to find some wild host plants and displace some or all of them, or bring some indoors, but if you're interested in more information about the Black Swallowtail life cycle, or raising some yourself indoors, check out these two resources:

Life Cycle of the Black Swallowtail
Raise Black Swallowtail Butterflies Indoors

And do tell:  What would YOU do if you were in my shoes?