I was supposed to be doing the grocery shopping. Instead I waited for a butterfly to emerge from its chrysalis. I didn’t know how long it would take, as I’d never seen it happen before.

My grandmother introduced me to the magic of butterflies when I was a little girl, helping her in the garden. We would “catch” the caterpillars and put them in old mayonnaise jars with holes punched in the lids and lots of food leaves: milkweed for the Monarchs. I would sit and watch the caterpillars munch on leaves and listen to the soft crunch-crunch-crunch. Once the caterpillars had spun their chrysalises, we would carefully remove any uneaten leaves and stems to make room for the future butterfly.

The chrysalis was not so interesting to watch, but one day I would go out to the garage (Mom made me keep my bugs in the garage—but I did manage to sneak fireflies into my room. What good are fireflies in the garage?) to check on the green blob hanging there and find a butterfly in the jar instead. Sometimes its wings would still be wet and we would watch the newly emerged butterfly stretch and dry them before we opened the jar to let it fly away.

This time I’m hoping to see the chrysalis split and the wet insect crawl out. There’s a lot of butterfly in that small space. It must be like a road map. Only one way to fold it to make it fit.

I missed the final shedding of the caterpillar skin. Both caterpillars that I took from a friend’s garden in late August had been hanging upside-down in their J-shapes for a couple of days when my husband and I went to the Hopkinton Fair on the first of September. I checked them before we left, and when we got back the caterpillars were gone and in their places were light green chrysalises accented with gold and black. The caterpillar skins lay on the bottom of the container like discarded Halloween costumes.

For two weeks now the chrysalises have hung from the lattice covering their clear plastic box, jiggling gently as I typed or more vigorously when a dog bumped the table. The other morning I noticed that one looked darker than before. Holding it up to the light I could see the orange and black of the butterfly’s wings inside, and even some of the white spots.

I wondered why the chrysalis is green for the two weeks of pupation. The light green would make the chrysalis inconspicuous on the underside of a leaf during its relatively vulnerable sedentary phase, yet normally the Monarch relies instead on a conspicuous advertisement of its unpalatability. (Milkweed contains a poison which the caterpillar ingests and uses for its own protection.) Why the change in tactics? The mystery of what goes on inside the chrysalis from one day to the next makes my head spin.

I couldn’t put that shopping off forever, but when I got home the butterfly was still in her chrysalis. She waited for the cover of night to emerge. When I got up at seven Saturday morning, there she was. The second, also a female, (the males have a small scent patch on their hind wing that looks like a wide spot in the black veins) came out Saturday night, and I set them both free on Sunday morning. They broke their fast on my Echinacea and fluttered away.

What’s amazing about this fall generation of butterflies is that they won’t simply fly around eating nectar, looking glorious, and then mate and die. They have a long journey ahead of them. Barring unforeseen accidents with speeding cars or any animals that haven’t learned what those bright colors mean, they will fly south to Mexico, feeding on nectar along the way.

They will pass the winter in huge colonies high in the mountains near Mexico City, where it is cold enough to keep them from reproducing, but not so cold as to kill them. In the spring they will mate and the females will head north, probably laying their eggs somewhere in Texas. The generation born of those eggs will fly farther north still, following the milkweed bloom.
 
Eventually butterflies will reach us here in New Hampshire. The females will lay their eggs, only one per plant, on the milkweed. And soon a new crop of caterpillars will emerge and begin feeding on the milkweed, crunch-crunch-crunching their way to butterflyhood.

09/28/2006

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