Fall Butterfly Hatching

One Saturday a few weeks ago Riley collected lots of caterpillars from our backyard and put them into our two acrylic hatching containers. The only issue we had was the lack of leaves to feed them. We struggled to find enough to sustain all of them, so I released many of the caterpillars back into the yard to fend for themselves. We just couldn’t keep them all.

We ended up with six chrysalis formations. One of them never hatched, two were really small, one hatched but hadn’t formed properly, and two were perfect. (Oh, and one chrysalis looked like it had a face on it…..can you see it?) I was surprised to see caterpillars in the fall, but the boys loved the unexpected visitors.

I released one while they were at school, Rory helped me with two others, and Riley took care of the last one. That one didn’t want to fly away; maybe he liked the stripes on Riley’s pjs!

 

 

 

Nature, y’all. It’s a wonder.