Morbid Butterfly Post

It's been kind of a sad bug day for me. Last week when we had all these fat caterpillars, they all started leaving and I notice one last caterpillar searching for leftover leaves. It was gnawing at a stalk, so I cut off the stalk and put it all in our butterfly cage. Rob suggested we buy another milkweed to feed it, but by the time we got it new leaves, it was starting to act really strange, and then once it noticed the leaves they were really weapy, so it didn't eat them, so I let it go and it lay in the dirt looking pitiful for a while and then I noticed later it had disappeared.

Ok, all that to say - we got a new plant. So I planted it in the ground next to the naked stalks and of course, the bright red flowers attracted butterflies immediately, who laid eggs and I found them today - three of them - and I knew they would not get enough from the new plant and the new leaves are just starting to grow back on the first plants. I thought about it for a moment and then I decided to euthanize the eggs by picking off the stem they were laid on. They wouldn't have had enough to eat anyway and would have stripped the plants before they could grow back leaves... (Lori, please don't tell Danielle!) I didn't actually kill them, but I don't think their chances of survival are very high.

So here I was feeling like a caterpillar murderer and I was walking around our play area breaking up big chunks of mulch when I saw a familiar stripey thing on the ground - it was a dead caterpillar. Actually it had attached to a piece of mulch and begun to molt, the top was split open and there was a green circle over the head...and it had just died like that.

I picked it up with a stick and buried it.

It's just a bug...just a bug...just a bug.