Year in, year out, I fight it, that urge to take in all the little caterpillars and keep them safe from harm.
Usually, things go well for the monarchs and I see them hatch, eat, grow, thrive, pupate and flutter away in the wild. This year is different. Very different.
For one, monarchs have been declared endangered. Not by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, no...that takes for-freakin'-ever. The change in status was announced, rather, by the International Union for Conservation of Nature a few weeks ago. Essentially they're yelling at the USFWS that somebody's got to say something about this disappearing insect. Monarchs are big and charismatic and people notice them, which makes it all the more dispiriting that we are letting them slip away before our eyes.
Here on a micro-scale, it's a very wet year in Ohio (like almost nowhere else in the country). I don't know if that is why there are so many predatory stinkbugs, but every monarch caterpillar I've found on my yard "ranch" in the first part of the season was eventually killed by stinkbugs. It really bothers me to see a great fat fourth instar monarch that I've been watching since it was a tiny hatchling, hanging limply from the sucking beak of a stinkbug. If there's anything that bothers me, it's seeing a young thing die.
So, reluctantly, I've climbed aboard the Crazy Caterpillar Lady Train again. But I'm only bringing them inside while they're tiny, and then again when they turn into chrysalides. I'm researching and experimenting with ways to keep them outside in the sun and wind and rain, chewing away on live milkweed, with fine mesh sleeves to protect them from parasites and predators. It's been a thing. I just don't think they were meant to grow up in an air conditioned house, or jammed together in a plastic box.
My obsession with watching the caterpillars in transition has pushed me to learn some things about time lapses and video editing. I'm proud to present my latest effort: five hours of caterpillar to chrysalis transition, condensed to a very satisfying minute and a half. Made the video today, August 30, 2022.
I hope you enjoy it.
9 comments:
I'm not seeing stinkbugs here, but I too hate the low rate of success...but also hate to bring them in because I know they aren't happy inside. I've really struggled with trying to decide what is best this year.
I hear you! I think I'm finding a happy medium with sleeving. I'll blog more about it.
Easy and cheap and incredibly satisfying! I just wanted to get this fresh timelapse
up because it turned out soo beautifully.
I've done the Crazy Caterpillar Lady, up to tagging and release, for several years. I have videos of them going to chrysalis and emerging from chrysalis, what a rush! And then I have photos of those stinkbugs sucking a poor 'pillar dry, disturbing to say the least. But even doing that, slowly but surely, year after year, they have been fewer and fewer in my little patch, and not just monarchs. I've seen much fewer butterflies this year even with flourishing Joe Pye and wild senna, black-eyed suzies and cardinal flower. Native and swamp milkweed just standing there untouched.
I look and look and I still do not understand what is happening inside there. It's still the same miracle it was when I first heard about it as a child.
I love that time-lapse video. Thank you so much for that. The beauty and intricacy of our natural world intrigues and delights us in every way.
wonderful! ... what a little miracle!
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