Butterfly and Wildlife Gardening And Photography In Houston Texas
Category Archives: Caterpillars I finally got around to taking some pictures of our Custom Butterfly Enclosure and the Monarch Caterpillars and Chrysalises that are inside. We put some of the Monarch Caterpillars in this enclosure for a couple of reasons. One, is to protect them from predators like Wasps. The other reason is to rotate the Milkweed. So…  The Fall 2010 Monarch Migration appears to be getting stronger in my backyard. My best guess is we have about 10 Chrysalises, and 35 Caterpillars. I’m also finding more and more eggs on the Milkweed. So far we have tagged 9 wild Monarchs, 6 females and 3 males. On of the males I spotted today…  I took a couple of pictures today of an event that I’ve never been able to photograph before. Butterfly Caterpillar’s shedding their skin. This first one is a Gulf Fritillary. These are scary looking Caterpillars. Notice at the bottom left of the Caterpillar is the skin that it recently shed. This second picture of a…  We have 28 young Monarch Caterpillars. I’m assuming that the eggs were originally laid from the Monarchs we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks. A few days ago I decided to check a couple of the Milkweed plants to see if any eggs had hatched. I was pleasantly surprised to find 28 young Monarch…  Remember the female Monarch that came by to visit the other day? I mentioned that she laid some eggs, and today one of those eggs hatched. I’ve never photographed a Monarch Caterpillar that was a mere minutes old. You can even see its egg casing in the background. It’s quite amazing to me that these…  After one of the young male Cardinals finished bathing, he took time out to pose in front of the Milkweed. Some of you Butterfly Gardeners may notice how full that Milkweed is. The reason it’s so full, not just in this particular place but all across the yard, is because we only had 7 Monarch…  Today certainly has been interesting. I’ll start with the Monarchs. Originally we had 9 Monarch caterpillars from that adult Monarch who probably traveled from Mexico. Now we have 7. Two of them died, but I’m not sure why. I had been keeping the Monarch caterpillars in a protected enclosure to protect them from wasps, and…  I thought I’d provide a little backyard Butterfly update. We haven’t seen any Monarch Butterflies, but we do have 9 Caterpillars from the one Monarch from Mexico. To give the Caterpillars the best chance of success, I have quarantined them in our Butterfly Enclosure. I did this to protect the Caterpillars from predatory wasps and…  We went out tonight and started to see if we could finally recognize some of the young caterpillars that were laid there by their mother from Mexico. You may remember me mentioning we have only seen 1 Monarch and she didn’t lay very many eggs on the milkweed. We were only about to find about… Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been taking it easy for the last two weeks. I still need to post some additional bird pictures from Anahuac, and I have some new Butterfly pictures to post as well. Speaking of Butterflies, during the snow we recently had, Leecy and I went out and collected all… Now this is exciting news! I posted a couple of weeks back on how Painted Lady and Monarch Butterfly Caterpillars were sent aboard the space shuttle. The Painted Lady Butterflies hatched from their Chrysalises a couple of weeks ago, and now it’s been reported that a Monarch emerged from its Chrysalises as well. According to…  The Monarch and Gulf Fritillary Caterpillars are really prevalent right now in our backyard. I found one Gulf Fritillary Caterpillar beginning to move into the Chrysalis stage. It was hanging from our rock waterfall on our pool. We also have lots of Monarch Caterpillars feeding on the Milkweed. Look how fat this Caterpillar is!  After I took the shots of the large and small Monarch Caterpillar I started looking for different Caterpillars to take pictures of. I then found these two guys who were really fighting. Actually, I’ve never seen Monarch Caterpillars fight like this. One Caterpillar would raise up off of the leaf and then swing its head…  I’m referring to these two Monarch Caterpillars. My original intention was just to show the different sizes between these two Monarch Caterpillars. It wasn’t until I downloaded the picture that I saw that the smaller Caterpillar was actually pooping (green blob at the end of the smaller Caterpillar) as the larger Caterpillar inched closer.  We have quite a few Monarch Caterpillars right now. We counted at least 20 of them today feeding on the Milkweed. Fortunately, our Milkweed is looking pretty healthy and has lots of leaves so we should be able to feed them without any problems. The picture below was one of the larger Caterpillars we have… |
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