Butterfly and Wildlife Gardening And Photography In Houston Texas
Category Archives: Caterpillars I have a couple of exciting news items to share (at least they’re exciting to me). I made an impulse buy over the holidays and bought a new Canon EF 70-200 f2.8 II lens. From most of the reviews I’ve read on the web, this lens gets rave reviews. Since I sold my 100-400mm lens…  We still have lots of Monarch Butterflies flying around the yard and even more Monarch Caterpillars. Most of the Butterflies look very clean, not like they have been migrating for several hundred miles so I’m assuming these are new releases. What I’ve also noticed is that these Butterflies are mating, and in the case of…  Houston, we have a problem! I found 5 Monarch Caterpillars today. The problem with that is that I’ve been on vacation all week and I’ve never seen any Monarch Butterflies. Leecy gets home well before dark, and she hasn’t seen any Monarch Butterflies either. So where did they come from? Were they Monarchs migrating from…  What a difference a day makes! Today was a beautiful day, nothing but sunshine. That, in turn, brought out the hungry Monarch Caterpillars. I was totally surprised when I went outside to check on them and found out that they were clustering on the two remaining Milkweed plants they had not already devoured. I’m going…  I had no idea we had so many Monarch Caterpillars! Because of their size, I decided it would be in the best interest of their safety if I moved them to our Butterfly Enclosure. There are six Milkweed plants in the Enclosure. With so many Monarch Caterpillars, I don’t expect these plants to have many…  Just a brief update tonight since I am getting home late. I’ll be posting lots of pictures this weekend, especially since we now have lots of Monarch Caterpillars. I just checked some of our Milkweed plants tonight, and many of them are covered in Monarch Caterpillars. The picture below is just one plant (and not…  I got home while there was still a little bit of daylight left, so I grabbed my camera to take some pictures of the Butterfly Caterpillars we have. First are the Eastern Black Swallowtail Caterpillars. We have quite a few of these now, we’ve counted around 20, but our Fennel is so thick, I’m sure… I know I’ve been posting lots of bird pictures, but the Butterfly pictures are coming as well. We have lots of little Monarch Caterpillars right now from the single female that we saw a couple of weeks ago. We also have lots of little Caterpillars from the Eastern Black Swallowtail. I simply ran out of…  I released 3 Monarch Butterflies today (they eclosed three days ago). Two of the Butterflies immediately flew away as soon as they were released, but one Male Monarch decided to hang around and sun himself. Speaking of Monarch Butterflies, we currently have 8 Chrysalises, 2 Caterpillars (who are likely sick..I’ll explain shortly), and 4 adult…  We have 18 Monarch Caterpillars, 9 are Chrysalises. We even found more Caterpillars on the outdoor Milkweed which was surprising since the temperature got down to 22F last week. Since the weather is supposed to be in the 60′s until the weekend, we are leaving the ones we found outside in the outdoor Butterfly enclosure….  We have two Monarchs that are in our indoor Butterfly enclosure. It didn’t even make it to 50 degrees today, but I simply had to try and get a few photos of Butterflies with this rented lens I am using. We placed this male Monarch on this Pine branch. He was very anxious to fly… I don’t have any pictures to share tonight but I thought I’d provide an update on our Butterfly Garden, particularly with the Monarchs. Strangely enough, we have quite a few Monarch Butterflies right now. We’ve been releasing 1-2 Monarchs per day for the last couple of weeks. In a way, this makes some sense. In… Getting this video has taken hours and days. I tried waiting for about 3 1/2 hours last night for this Monarch Caterpillar to form a Chrysalis, and of course it didn’t happen. Then I got up early this morning, and sat in this stool for another 3 hours waiting for this to occur and I…  This is a bit unexpected, but we have lots of Monarch Caterpillars, Chrysalises, and Eggs. Perhaps it’s because it’s December and it’s 80 degrees right now. We have 13 Chrysalises, eggs all over the outside Milkweed, and probably 10 Caterpillars. As we find the Caterpillars we bring them inside as the weather does occasionally get…  As I’m sure most of the folks in the U.S. are experiencing, we are bracing for a big cold front here in Houston. Yea, I know, how cold does Houston really get, but when it’s been 82-83 degrees that last two days and tonight it’s dropping down to 31 this weekend, that’s cold for us…. |
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