Butterflies!

Yesterday morning I went outside to find three butterflies emerged and hanging from the siding on the shed! I have concluded that maybe when they say the butterflies emerge in the morning they mean daybreak- not my morning which falls around 8:00 - 8:30. This was confirmed by my aunt whose entomologist friend said it only takes a couple hours for their wings to stiffen. By the time I saw them, their wings were completely flat.

I turned around to Theo barking at this fourth one in the grass. One of its wings was bent. I helped it over to the milkweed area out of the rain. The entomologist also said that if their wings aren't stiff after a couple hours then they probably won't make it.

When I came home in the afternoon I saw this one behind the shed, but there weren't any other empty chrysalises.

This morning there were no new butterflies, but when I took Theo out an hour later there were five butterflies in the grass. One with very crumpled wings like the one you saw in the last post. I felt like I was in some kind of butterfly twilight zone. Several hours later there were two in the grass- one with the crumpled wings and another one whose wings looked like they just wilted over.

I think we need 24 hour surveillance on these butterflies.