I've had a Monarch butterfly garden for a few years and some years there is an early hard frost. In early October the temps dropped to the low 20's and I found a monarch caterpillar on the ground under a milkweed plant. They only eat milkweed at that stage of their development. I brought it inside, fed it milkweed leaves and soon there was a lovely chrysalis, green w/metallic gold spots, in the cage. Well, two days ago a beautiful monarch butterfly emerged from it's chrysalis and I just had to share.
Monarch #2 male 23Oct2017.jpg 157.67KB
4 downloads
It's a perfect little boy! Photo taken the day he hatched.
Now that he's a butterfly he needs to eat nectar and would normally migrate with the others to southern California or maybe Mexico. But although we are having warm days, the flowers and other Monarchs are gone, and nights can be quite cold.
Since I have family in the San Francisco Bay Area and we usually visit in the Fall, guess who will be coming with us on a trip to SF? We leave tomorrow and are giving him a little migration jump-start. He will be released at the SF Botanical Gardens where there is food and he can continue his migration.
Here is a video of a Monarch hatching - time-lapse photography.
Edited by Carol Christensen, 25 October 2017 - 02:24 PM.