Book Sharing Monday - A Butterfly Is Patient

Dianna Hutts Aston and Sylvia Long did a wonderful job on this book about butterflies.

We thoroughly enjoyed this one!

With it's beautiful illustrations and descriptive wording, we learned what a butterfly's life is like. We learned things like how butterflies find flowers and how they help plants. What a great book to learn about butterflies!

Our Butterfly

Within the first couple of weeks we captured two caterpillars. One was a Monarch caterpillar and the other was a Tussock Moth Caterpillar. The Monarch came out of it's crysalis fairly quickly but the moth is still in it's cocoon. This is one experience we missed about being in Ontario while living in Alberta and I jumped at the opportunity when we came back to Ontario. Here are some more pictures.

Black Swallowtail Butterfly

Here is our butterfly house. We made it at a Homeschool Bug Co-Op. It works well. I wish I could find the instructions on how to make it so I can share, but I was unsuccessful. It's pretty easy but not so easy to explain without illustrations or pictures. Sorry, guys. If anyone finds instructions, please share them with me and I'll share it here.

We started with 6 caterpillars. Four of them are now butterflies and we let them go. Two of them are in the chrysalis stage. We've done well, with the exception of one butterfly that our cats got a hold of one early morning. We set it free because it was still alive but it was unable to fly. Now I keep the butterfly house hanging on a ceiling lamp in the office where I can shut the door at night, locking the cats out.

This is one of our success stories. I captured a picture of it while it rested on a tree branch in our yard, before taking flight.

Black Swallowtail Butterfly

Our oldest caterpillar showed signs that it would be coming out yesterday. The main sign is that the beautiful greenish colour goes a murky black colour. We took it with us everywhere we went so that we wouldn't miss it. 

Looking up close we could see more and more details through the chrysalis. 

We went out and while we were out we took the jar with us. We even brought it into Harveys when we ate lunch. Good thing we did because as soon as we got all settled and started to take our first bites it started to emerge.  I took video and was way too excited, so it's good that my hubby decided to edit it and add music. The kids liked to watch how he edited it on the computer. I'm glad you don't have to hear my shrieking, excited noises as we watch it come out. LOL! It was way to hard to contain the excitement. We've had many caterpillars but never actually saw the butterfly come out of it's chrysalis before. It's a good thing we didn't obey the signs as we entered Harveys that says "No Pets Allowed".

The kids took out the chrysalis for closer observation after we got home and learned that there was a liquid inside it. We identified the butterfly as a female. I'll take a picture of our butterfly tomorrow as we let it go outside so you can see the beautiful markings on it that helped us identify that it as a female.