As summer nears its end, so comes the time for the great great grandchildren of Mexico-born Monarchs who migrated north to emerge from their chrysalises and head back south for their winter family vacation.
This late-summer/early-fall generation of eastern North American Monarchs will fly thousands of miles towards the Oyamel Fir Trees in the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains of Mexico to winter in the warmer southern air. In all the world, no butterflies migrate like the Monarchs of North America. They travel farther than all other tropical butterflies - up to three thousand miles.
This year at The Tree House we gathered a handful of Monarch caterpillar eggs from the milkweed patch in our Andorra Meadow and brought them inside for observation, setting up a small microcosm in which they could flourish, full of milkweed and moisture.
It has been such a pleasure getting to watch the full Monarch life cycle up close, starting with the minuscule eggs glued to the underside of milkweed leaves. Within 3-5 days we had newly hatched caterpillars moving slowly around their leaves, ravenous and determined, munching away with tiny mouths and rapidly expanding bodies.
I already knew that caterpillars grow at an incredible rate, increasing their body mass by as much as 2,000 times during this critical phase, requiring them to molt (shed) five times before reaching satisfactory size. But still, watching a tiny creature expand like a balloon over the span of only a handful of days has been astounding.
Caterpillars’ sole purpose is to eat, and boy are they skilled in the art of consumption. A grown caterpillar can consume an entire milkweed leaf in eight minutes, and our caterpillars had us running to the meadow to replenish their milkweed supply quite a few times.
