Memorial Day Holiday Weekend

Looks like summer has definitely arrived in time for Memorial Day weekend here in Minnesota.  It doesn't seem very long ago that we were wondering what happened to winter and now summer is here.  We had storms on Saturday that dumped quite a lot of rain (which we needed) then a nearly record-breaking warm day yesterday (high of 89 degrees). 

Today has turned out to be a perfect day and I'm taking a break from getting my gardens in shape to do this blog post.

It's really nice to hear all the birds singing in the backyard again and I have some birdies taking advantage of the houses and nesting material I put out for them.  Here's the cozy little nest the chickadees made with moss, grass and some of the alpaca fiber I provided for their use.  There are 6 little eggs tucked into this fuzzy nest!

I took a look yesterday and here are 3 little baby chickadees almost ready to fledge.  They are just the cutest little things!  I'm not sure why the other 3 eggs didn't hatch, but 3 babies will be more than enough for the parents to take care of.

Mr. & Mrs. Eastern Bluebird also moved into one of my Peterson nestboxes.  They built a nice multi-layered nest with alpaca fiber on the bottom, then some grass and lastly a good layer of white pine needles.  This is the first time I can ever remember the bluebirds using white pine needles, but it definitely makes a nice, substantial nesting material for them.

There are 3 pretty blue eggs in here.  They should hatch sometime in the next week.

I've been working on getting some more native flowering plants added to my butterfly and hummingbird garden.  I bought this Golden Alexander plant at the garden center a couple weeks ago.  On the plant info card, it said Golden Alexander is a host plant for swallowtail butterflies.  I was happy to find this little swallowtail caterpillar on the plant stem.  Now I'll have to be really careful when I plant it so I don't dislodge the little bugger! 

I'm starting to see lots more butterflies in my yard already this season and I'm hoping that all the new flowers I'm planting will encourage them to stick around for the summer.  I had a nice Question Mark on the hummingbird feeder yesterday and also saw a couple of Mourning Cloaks earlier this spring.  Quite a few Monarchs are already flying around and the milkweed is coming in nicely, so there will be plenty of food sources for the monarch caterpillars.  I bought 2 new milkweed plants for my butterfly garden too -- one has orange flowers and the other has yellow flowers.  Probably won't be long and I'll have to think about getting the monarch ranch up and running again too......



Hope you're not tired of monarchs yet!

I pulled a few weeds in the garden yesterday afternoon and threw them into the wheelbarrow for Mr. Johnson to dispose of . After dumping the weeds, he came into the house and asked me whether I had noticed the monarch chrysalis on the wheelbarrow. Sadly, I hadn't noticed it at all.

The wheelbarrow always sits in the same spot in the backyard next to the compost box. On top of the compost box in a long flower box, I'm growing some more milkweed plants (sometimes known as butterfly weed [Asclepia tuberosa]) from seed. These little seedlings are only a few inches tall, but they're very attractive to the monarch caterpillars. I bet the chrysalis on this wheelbarrow is from one of those caterpillars that was snacking on those butterfly weed seedlings earlier this week.

After taking this photograph, I removed the chrysalis from the wheelbarrow and placed it in monarch ranch along with the 17 other chrysalis still waiting to hatch into monarch butterflies.

Another milkweed plant in my yard that's receiving lots of attention from monarch caterpillars this summer is this Swamp White Milkweed. I planted it last summer and was happy to see that it made it through the winter and has developed into a huge, beautiful plant this summer. It has been blooming for several weeks now and has even developed some seed pods that I will save and try to grow more plants from next spring.

I'm amazed at how much the monarch caterpillars love this plant! It's not unusual for me to find at least 5-6 caterpillars on it every day. I collected 5 for the monarch ranch earlier this afternoon and then found these 2 additional ones a couple hours later.

I think there are at least 16 caterpillars of all sizes crawling around in the monarch ranch right now. At this rate, I shouldn't have any problem achieving my goal of raising, tagging and releasing 50 monarch butterflies in my backyard this summer.

Monarch Ranch Update

Things are going well in my monarch ranch. Lots of hungry caterpillars are feasting on all the milkweed leaves I can harvest. I'm guessing that maybe half of the caterpillars I raised from eggs have survived. If I find any wild caterpillars when I'm out harvesting milkweed leaves for food, I round them up for the ranch too (found 2 more just this afternoon!) It's really cool to see all of them crawling around and boy, are they ever hungry! When I put my ear down close to the lid, I can actually hear them munching away on these leaves......it's pretty neat!

One monarch butterfly hatched last week -- it was a male. Here are the other chrysalis that have been created on the lid of my monarch ranch. There are 2 additional new chrysalis since yesterday and 6 large caterpillars clinging to the roof that will probably turn into chrysalis sometime in the next 24 hours.

The other positive thing that happened today is that my monarch butterfly tags (50!!) arrived in today's mail. Now all butterflies that hatch from my ranch will be tagged before being released into the wild for their fall migration journey to Mexico.

Are you interested in monarch tagging? It's not necessary to grow your own butterflies from caterpillars. Anyone can tag and release monarch butterflies. Please click on this Monarch Watch link to learn more and to order your own tags. It's a really enjoyable project, gets you outside in beautiful late summer weather, helps you learn more about monarch butterflies and the habitats they prefer, plus it's a fabulous activity to share with your kids or grandkids!

Inchworm, I Love You!

Those of you of a certain age will certainly remember this Inchworm toy and song. On our Minnesota Master Naturalist field trip last Saturday, I had the chance to spend a few minutes of quality time with an inchworm. Needless to say, the inchworm song was running through my head during our encounter. Enjoy the movie!

To help you with your bird song ID, here's the list of what birds were singing during the video:

Eastern Wood Pewee

Great Crested Flycatcher

House Wren

Field Sparrow

Rooster

American Goldfinch

Indigo Bunting

(I didn't list them in order of appearance so you will have a bit of a challenge!)

Let's Talk About Monarch Caterpillars

My next couple of posts are going to be devoted solely to talking about monarchs, so hopefully these will answer any questions you might have in case you're thinking about raising monarchs for yourself.

By now, you've probably heard or read the news that the monarch numbers (and butterflies in general) are all down this summer--perhaps due to the chillier and wetter than usual weather many of us have been experiencing this summer.

I've been finding quite a few monarch caterpillars in the backyard this week and here's a look at my re-populated monarch ranch.

Here are 4 large caterpillars I found on 2 plants the other night.

Monarch ranching is a really fun project that you might want to pursue with your kids or grandkids (or even on your own as I do!). So let's say you want to start a ranch, let me share some tips with you for going out and finding some caterpillars yourself.

First of all, you've got to find some Common Milkweed--the caterpillar's favorite food source. Hopefully you'll have some of this growing in your backyard or somewhere nearby. (And of course, you don't want to pick any that's been sprayed with chemicals.) The best thing to look for is a leaf that's been munched on. If you're lucky, the caterpillar will still be there and if you're really lucky, the caterpillar will be on top of the leaf!

Another clue to look for is poop (frass) on the leaves below where a caterpillar might be. The bigger the frass, the bigger the caterpillar you'll find.

Here's a lucky find--3 caterpillars on one plant, but notice that 2 are hiding underneath the leaves.

If you do find some caterpillars to populate your ranch, remember that you'll have to continue feeding them. I usually pick several leaves while I'm out there and store them in a baggie in the fridge. Once the caterpillars get bigger, they're eating machines, so you have to make sure you've got enough food to keep them fed until they turn into a chrysalis.

And speaking of chrysalis, take a look at what I also found yesterday........

A monarch chrysalis in the wild!! In all of my 50 years on this earth, it's the first time I've ever seen one! I was trimming back this huge milkweed patch next to the driveway because it had gotten too overgrown and was obstructing our view when backing out. The breeze just happened to blow this leaf back and I spotted the chrysalis. Thank goodness I didn't cut this stalk off before I saw the chrysalis.

Here's what it looked like when the leaf was just hanging--what amazing camouflage!

So I decided to remove this chrysalis from the leaf and add it to my ranch to see if it would hatch. Did you know you could do that? Let me show you how I did it. And before I go any further, I should tell you that I learned this from Dave, my monarch monitoring/bluebirding/master naturalist mentor.

Because this leaf would die before the butterfly hatched and the chrysalis has to hang in order for the butterfly to develop properly, I had to get it off the leaf.

See that little black "stem" at the top of the chrysalis? It's very stiff and hard, so this is what I'm going to attach a hanging thread to. That will allow me to tie the chrysalis to the roof of my monarch ranch. I put a needle at each end of the thread to make it easier to work with and just tied a good, tight square knot around the black stem.

Before the caterpillar turns into the chrysalis, it attaches itself to the underside of where the chrysalis will hang with a strong patch of silk. My next step was to carefully remove this silk patch from the leaf, so I pulled the handy-dandy Leatherman Micra from my pocket (you carry one of these with you at all times, right?) and gently loosened the silk patch from the leaf.

Once it's loosened, the entire patch was easily removed from the leaf.

Ta-Da!!! A monarch chrysalis ready to be attached to the ceiling of my monarch ranch.

In previous years, I've collected mostly eggs and raised them into caterpillars. This is the first year when the majority of my monarch butterflies will be hatched from larger caterpillars found in the backyard. There is a little bit more risk in hatching monarchs this way, mainly due to the chance of parasitic wasps or flies laying their eggs in the larva. There is no visible evidence when this occurs, but usually what happens is the butterfly is unable to develop due to the parasitic wasp or fly which develops instead inside the chrysalis. I've only had it happen a couple of times, but it's quite disappointing and something that you want to be aware of in case it happens in your monarch ranch.

Before I finish, here is an excellent website (just click on the link) if you're looking for more information on monarchs: Monarch Watch. I also really like "The Butterfly Book" by Don & Lillian Stokes as a reference guide. And I would be more than happy to try and answer any questions you have also. You can leave a comment or feel free to e-mail me (rjknits at msn dot com).

I hope you enjoyed learning more about collecting monarch caterpillars. Next time, I'm going to show you how to tag the monarch butterflies that you've raised in your ranch.

Now Open - Monarch Ranch 2009

As one of my Master Naturalist projects this summer, I'm volunteering at Quarry Hill Nature Center on Wednesday nights collecting data on the numbers of monarch eggs and caterpillars for the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, sponsored by the University of Minnesota.

I'm learning some new things about monarch caterpillars and tonight I brought home these two fourth and fifth instar caterpillars to put in my new monarch ranch. I gave them some fresh milkweed leaves and they're happily munching away.

The monarch activity (and all butterfly activity in general) seems much slower this year than previous years and just this past week, I finally saw several monarch butterflies flitting around my backyard. Since I was adding these two monarch caterpillars to my ranch, I decided to check some of the milkweed in my own backyard after I got home to see if I could find anything and was lucky enough to find these 6 eggs.

I will wait until they hatch and grow a little bit and then add these caterpillars to my monarch ranch. This will be a good start for what I hope will be another successful season of raising, tagging and releasing monarch butterflies in my backyard (aka, Monarch Waystation 1515).