This afternoon the kids wanted to color in the driveway so we headed outdoors for a little bit. Not even 5 minutes into their activity one of them noticed a caterpillar... then another... and another. Then I noticed one on the garage door and two on the side of the house. They kids caught all these and put them in their bug catcher to observe. A few minutes later another one crawled across the driveway. As Thomas was catching that one, he spotted one in the grass. We began to get suspicious and started looking carefully around the front of the house. We spotted another 10 on the underside of the porch (the ceiling) and under the roof eaves. Crazy! Upon further investigation, we found where they were all coming from: the tree in the front yard. There must be thousands of them in varying stages on that tree. It was a little creepy to find the first 10 but now seeing all these in the tree is quite a different feeling. We got the ladder out so we could get a better view. It's amazing. The neighbor kids came out and collected some for themselves to observe at home, too. Within a few weeks, we could have thousands of these Mourning Cloak Butterflies flying around our house!
.
typical branch; the wind is blowing some of the caterpillars off
.
younger ones, maybe babies?
No comments:
Post a Comment