Waldo And The Prof

So come meet my new foster: Waldo the Monarch Caterpillar. He’ll be living at my place for a few weeks until he does the butterfly thing, at which point we’ll release him for migration.

The Prof and I have been looking since the beginning of August for a monarch chrysalis. We’ve been investigating all the milkweed plants in a local conservation park, looking for butterflies-in-waiting without success.

It has been a bumper year for monarch butterflies around here. I’ve seen untold numbers of them on the wing, and we found quite a few monarch caterpillars feasting on milkweed in the park. As the end of summer approaches and the egg-laying season ends it appeared that if we were ever to see a chrysalis we’d have to take matters into our own hands.

Yesterday we returned to the preserve. The milkweeds are done flowering, and many of the milkweed pods are turning brown and cracking open to release their complement of parachute-seeds (as an aside, I remember my mother telling me about seeing children in the autumn fields during World War II gathering milkweed pods – the silk in them was used to stuff life vests and flight jackets). After a good period of searching, we finally found one single monarch caterpillar, which looked healthy but was hanging around on the top of a milkweed leaf. This is abnormal, since caterpillars tend to graze from underneath the leaf, where they are better hidden from predators.

I used this strange behavior as justification that this caterpillar had to be protected from himself. We packed him and a handful of milkweed leaves up in a Trader Joe’s bag, and took him home with us. We’ll keep him fed and protected until he finishes transitioning into butterflyhood, at which point we’ll let him go back into the wilds.

We haven’t actually settled on a name yet – technically this is The Prof’s caterpillar so I’ll let him do the honors. Since we’ve spent way too much time in the last twelve hours looking into the jar and asking where the caterpillar is, I’ve decided that for purposes of this journal I shall call the caterpillar Waldo (as in “Where’s Waldo?”). Because bringing Waldo inside will keep him warmer than he’d be otherwise, his metamorphosis should be somewhat sped up. With luck this means that he should be ready to fly south before we get any extreme cold.

Meanwhile, I have caterpillar poop to clean out of the canister.