Butterfly sanctuary at a neighbor's home

Our neighbor down the street invited me over to photograph the monarch butterflies hatching out of their chrysalises on her screened-in deck this morning. This lady is absolutely incredible. She does so much to help increase the butterfly population on the island. She works tirelessly every day to make sure the butterfly’s eggs make it into caterpillars, then the caterpillars make it safely into the chrysalis stage, then watches them carefully hatch. She makes sure they are safe while their wings dry and they get strong enough to fly. Then, she carefully helps them out of the screen deck to the outside world.

She has released almost “40 butterflies in the last 2 days”. And there are more that will hatch tomorrow.

To start, below on the left is a chrysalis that is close to hatching. If you saw my blog from a couple of days ago, this chrysalis was a light green. In the photo on the right, you’ll see the monarch butterfly beginning to break out of the cocoon at the bottom left of the chrysalis.

Following is a video of the hatching process of this chrysalis.

The butterfly on the left is maybe 30 to 45 minutes older than the one on the right.

And then a while later, they are closer to the same size.

After a few hours, she moved them to the patio screen near the door. They were able to dry their wings more and get energy from the sun. One at a time, we held them up to the outside until they were ready to leave and fly away. Some would fly immediately and others would stay on our hands until they were ready to go. It was a fascinating process.

The butterfly above is a male and the one below is female. How can you tell, you ask? That was my question to her, too! Do you see the black dot just below the center of the inner wing on the orange line? That means it is male. Below, the female does not have those little black dots.

As I was leaving to go back home, she showed me a newly hatched teeny tiny caterpillar on a plant in the front yard. She plans to move it to the screened lanai to protect it. She showed me another caterpillar eating and getting ready to create its chrysalis and also a small chrysalis on the underside of a plant leaf on her lanai. The whole cycle starts over again. She loves helping these beautiful creatures in their process. I cannot imagine how many butterflies she has added to our beautiful island, but I was honored to share the process with her today. It was just so fascinating!