Sometimes when I go for a walk around the grounds I sometimes forget we are in the middle of a pandemic. While Covid-19 has turned our world upside down, the natural world is moving along as if nothing has changed – the flowers are blooming, the bees are pollinating, the fireflies are dancing; nature seems the way it have always been, rather normal. Though in nature, nothing is ever normal.
Whenever I am talking about adaptations, I always tell my audience, "Everything in nature – ...
Yes, we are! A "Monarch Waystation" that is. After researching about the Monarch Waystation program, I discovered that we already had a designated ID #, which means we have been a waystation for quite some time. We are station #194 on the www.monarchwatch.org/waystations/ monarch map. Annually we have seen the monarch and her eggs and the caterpillar on our milkweed plants.
When the first part of this blog was posted our caterpillar was still inside its chrysalis; and it stayed inside for about 14 days. I was starting to wonder if something went wrong – usually the chrysalis becomes translucent but the one hanging outside our door was still very green. Was the butterfly ever going to emerge? Like a doting parent, I checked on it several times a day hoping that I would catch the moment when it began to crawl out of the chrysalis. As luck would have it, I came i...