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Return of the Caterpillars

Sounds like a great title for a horror movie, doesn’t it?

After our Painted Lady butterflies this June, I thought that the boys and I were done with caterpillars, at least until next spring. Not so fast, said Mother Nature. I went out to my herb garden for mint this afternoon, and found these little crawlers happily munching away on my parsley:

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The boys thought they were pretty cool – great, big caterpillars that stick-out funny little orange antennae when you get too close (which of course, both boys did). We counted seven in total, and now I know why my parsley has all but been obliterated. Turns out, these little guys are Eastern Black Swallowtail caterpillars. The female butterfly will lay her eggs on a host plant, like parsley, and her little babies will feed on the plant until they are ready to hide away in their chrysalides. Now, I don’t know about you, but the thought of butterfly eggs on my parsley made the parsley a whole lot less appetizing, so I decided to let the creepy-crawlers have it. Circle of life and all, right?

In exchange for the parsley, the boys and I took two caterpillar siblings for the bug-jug (we never did end up catching lightening bugs in the jug, but caterpillars work too):

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We found out (thank you Google), that these little guys also like to dine on carrot tops. Guess what? I have carrots growing in my garden! I trekked out to the backyard to get some, and Nicholas placed it in the jug, narrowly missing squishing one of our house-guests. Aside from the near miss by a three-year-old, it’s not a bad life for a caterpillar: a comfortable place to live, all the parsley and carrot tops they can eat, and a safe bird-free place to make their chrysalides.

Nicholas and Benjamin have named their new friends Airplane and Space Shuttle. I’m calling them Airy and Spacey for short. And the boys discovered something very cool (at least in little boy world) about their ravenous new friends: they poop. Yep - big, round poop, and ‘lots of it. Turns out, these guys poop when they are getting ready to transform. Both boys are concerned with how I will clean the poop out of Airy and Spacey’s habitat. I haven’t figured that one out myself either.

We decided that our new friends needed a larger home, so they are now happily installed in our butterfly hatchery. One small catch though: turns out these metamorphosing wonders winter in their chrysalides…which could be a problem. These creepy-crawlers might just be houseguests that overstay their welcome. 

Naomi xo

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