Lost: One monarch caterpillar
Tamster 3 months ago // 4 responses // Outdoor Adventure Gibber-gabber

Yesterday at work my co-worker kept rapping her scissors on the side of the green waste barrel and saying, “Get back in there!” I, myself, was busy dividing mints and spanish tarragon and took little interest in her trash can talk. After repeated episodes of her antics I finally decided to take a look at what she was fussing about. I casually walked over to her work area and took a peek in the barrel. Instantly my casual attitude turned to excitement as I saw the caterpillar crawling up out of the rosemary cuttings. It was a monarch caterpillar!

Suddenly I was transported to Santa Cruz, California where, at Natural Bridges State Beach, something like 100,000 monarch butterflies spend the winter in a Eucalyptus grove. Now, mid October, is the time of year when they will be arriving. The magical orange and black butterflies flutter about or cluster together on the Eucalyptus trees. I myself have spent many hours on the wooden deck below the trees in awe of these delicate creatures that migrate thousands of miles! Amazing!

So, here I am at Pearson’s Gardens nearly 500 miles from Santa Cruz and I get a pleasant reminder of some wonderful memories. I immediately let the little caterpillar climb onto my hand, dug through the discarded plant material, found another beautiful striped caterpillar and then went to get a milkweed plant for them to feed on. The milkweed plant is the ONLY plant the monarch larva can eat! There are over 30 varieties of milkweed. The one we are growing is Scarlet Milkweed, Asclepias curassavica, a plant with brilliant red and orange flowers.

Those caterpillars started munching that milkweed so fast I became anxious for the safety of the plant! I was informed that they would also eat fennel, so spotting a fennel patch on the way home from work I stopped and picked a few branches. Those caterpillars didn’t even glance fennels way. Last night I left the two crawlies outside with some milkweed and fennel (just in case) and in the morning they were still there sucking the sap from the milkweed. Hopefully the one milkweed plant that I have will be enough for them to get enough nourishment for the two weeks of feeding they need to do before they turn into a chrysalis. They really aren’t eating the fennel.

I returned from work today with a few extra milkweed leaves only to find that the caterpillars were gone! They ate all the milkweed and took off, not even leaving a thank you note! After a bit of looking, I managed to find one of them about ready to go through the “time warp” door, which is really a spinning darkroom door that is the only piece remaining of a once fully functioning dark room on our back patio. Still fearing he would eat all of the milkweed in a hurry, but not wanting him to wander off again, I brought the entire plant out for his chewing pleasure. He is now contentedly eating, stripping the plant bare of leaves in a rather timely fashion. If his buddy returns I fully expect to wake up tomorrow with nothing more than milkweed roots and some forlorn looking caterpillars searching for a place to get their next meal!

See Tammy’s follow-up post "The cycle continues… ":http://cotradeco.com/posts/1340-lost-one-monarch-caterpillar for more fun with the Monarch butterfly