With the busyness of putting our house on the market, our outings have been very limited. We decided today to try to find a monarch caterpillar. We were inspired since we're reading "An Extraordinary Life - The Story of a Monarch Butterfly" by Laurence Pringle. (he also wrote a very similar story that we had previously read about a dragonfly called "A Dragon in the Sky" which was very good).

We had heard that there were some milkweed plants near a playground near here so we headed off for the evening with everyone to check it out. Yes, I am somewhat of a novice in my knowledge about nature at this point. With my oldest being only 6, we're learning as much as we can together as a family. I'm sure he knows about as much as I do! So, my first task was to find the milkweed plants as I still wasn't sure what a milkweed plant looks like (yes I know all you veteran nature lovers think this is very elementary)! It took a short while, but I did find the plants that had the milky substance inside.

Next came searching the plants for caterpillars. We found some with lots of ants on them and some with milkweed bugs swarming all over them (that's what they looked like at least). They were swarming by a big green pod type thing on the plant. I'm sure someone out there could tell me more about what it is that grows on some of the milkweed plants. Finally we did stumble across a plant with a caterpillar on it. I could tell it wasn't a monarch caterpillar so we picked the leaf and put it in our butterfly container and put some more milkweed leaves on a stick in it and headed for home.

Our caterpillar

Then we went online to search for the name of the caterpillar. We discovered it's a milkweed tussock moth's caterpillar. So we'll keep feeding it milkweed leaves and see if we can watch it change into a moth! It would have been fun to get a monarch caterpillar, but maybe it's too late in the season for them, or maybe we just didn't find the right plant. Not bad for an evening out!

Melanie

p.s. - the best thing about Laurence Pringle's books is that they're VERY detailed about the insects and give a LOT of scientific information. They're definitely not your basic book about butterflies or dragonflies, but they're done in a fictitious way that makes the scientific detail much more interesting than just reading about it.