Butterflies :)

Yep, those caterpillars did turn into butterflies. And oh, was it fun! :D

It was cool that we had 4 of them to watch because if we missed one,, we still had the others to view. So good thing. :)

The Twins, Margaret and Jeff, (Kyra named them) hatched first and its just amazing how quickly the hatching,, or getting out of the chrysalis happens. Before I went on a walk they looked like this:


The dark ones are the ones that about ready to burst out.
After my walk they looked like this:


They are so amazing.

Here's Kyra with them on some flowers in the front of the house.


Then we went over to Fargo-Moorhead for 1 night, came back and Saddi our dog found the 3rd one under the table. It had come out while we were gone but it was ok, Saddi just stared at it and we released it outside.

The last one hatched a couple of days later, it was the runt of the bunch. Bob, as Kyra called him, was her favorite, and she was pretty sad because she stayed in Moorhead and missed it. We did take lots of pictures and even got video of him coming out of his chrysallis. I'm going to try and put that at You tube and I'll link it here later.

This whole process is so amazing and a couple of things happened this time that I'd never been able to see. First, I had never seen the chrysalis actually form. When the caterpillar gets nice and fat (a couple of weeks old) it turns into a J shape, then a day or so later loses its outer skin. Ours pretty much bursted out of its skin at the bottom and wriggled its way out, losing it from the top. Then you have the light green chrysalis. It stays as a chrysalis for about 2 weeks then at some point starts turning black and you can see the wings through the now transparent chrysalis. When its at that point, its going to come out soon, when it starts coming out, the actual emergence only takes maybe a minute.

Here's Bob with Abbi:


I'll post more pictures at my flicker account. I think you can access those pictures by clicking on the Flicker ad box on the sidebar of the blog.