Recently a friend approached me to ask about raising live butterflies. It’s one of my favorite things to talk about. I’m a big fan of butterfly kits for classrooms. They can help teachers to create a structured lesson around the life cycle of butterflies and expose lots of kids to these amazing creatures.
But even more than the kits is the experience of live butterflies in the relative wild. With a little effort you can easily track down butterflies in various stages of breeding and developing. And depending on how close they are to your home, you can do a lot of observing right there in the field.
I raise this because earlier today I was walking past the horse pasture and stopped to admire a stand of common milkweed. It was surrounded by some bull thistle and a few tired looked tiger lilies. It’s that time of summer. A lot of plants and flowers are beginning to show their age.
And there on the milkweed – steadily climbing the thick stem for the leaves over head – was a Monarch butterfly caterpillar.
I love these caterpillars. Or rather, I love the sight of them. This one is a bit early, but we are on the cusp of the stage when these little guys are going to start entering the pupa stage. As they hatch from eggs left by female Monarch butterflies, they will gorge on milkweed, loading up on nutrients to see them through the jade-colored chrysalis and eventually into new butterflies.
Each year, we harvest a couple of milkweed plants and take them into our home. This is a bit invasive, and each year we carefully evaluate the necessity. After all, with only a little effort we can head into the pasture or the far side of the garden, and observe them in their natural habitat.
But I got the butterfly bug in a classroom long ago, and I want to pass that on. My children are, with one exception, all under the age of ten. There is still something utterly magical to them about watching these caterpillars creep around the fifty gallon fish tank that we use. The kids love to pick fresh milkweed to ensure a sufficient amount of food. These little creatures become our pets!
And of course there is nothing like watching the chrysalis darken as the life inside it slowly undergoes a metamorphosis. When the butterflies finally emerge, we spend a whole day simply admiring them. Then we take them out into what remains of the flower garden and release them. Each year we take pictures. The kids remember the same event from the year before, and we always talk about the unique ability of Monarch Butterflies to cover long distances and find familiar ground.
We like to tell ourselves that these butterflies are going to sail off to Mexico soon, but that they or their descendants might come back to us.
However you do it, try and bring the magic of live butterflies into a child’s life. If it isn’t happening in their classrooms, see if you can’t talk the teacher into it. And if all else fails, do it the old-fashioned way. Take your son or daughter’s education into your own hands.
I think the critical thing is ensuring that we pass on some sense of wonder and beauty to our children. It’s easy to get sappy about this, but the truth is, if you don’t love something deeply – and understand and appreciate how much it relies on the habitat that you share with it – it gets too easy to think that the world is all your own.
So long as I share it with butterflies – and I’m awfully grateful that I do – then I am going to pass that on to my children. Some day they’ll do the same. And after I’m long gone, I can rest assured that somebody is taking care of the butterflies.
If we can do that, then we have done something we can take real pride in. So not today, but probably in the next few days, we’ll head out into the field and dig up some milkweeds. We’ll bring them inside. We’ll bring out little cycle of watching and nurturing into their bigger cycle of life, and we’ll all be better off for it.
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