Codependent to Caterpillars, Part II

Butterfly Garden

We love our front-yard butterfly garden, especially when we see several Monarch butterflies at once enjoying the flowers and bushes we've put there to attract them.

In fact, we've had lots of Monarchs this summer flying around and landing on the Asclepia, the lavenders and the Buddleia.

What we haven't had is what makes butterflies:  namely, caterpillars.  The Asclepia plants were flourishing, but with all those Monarchs fluttering around, they should have been all but stripped of leaves.  But they weren't.

After the disaster of the Anise Swallowtail caterpillars we found on the parsley in the back yard, probably gobbled up by the Scrub Jays that hang around our bird feeder, we relocated some several Monarch caterpillars from an Asclepia plant in the back yard.  When they, too, disappeared, we began to think that maybe it wasn't just the Scrub Jays eating our caterpillars.

Wasps, lizards, ants and other predators eat caterpillars and we now suspect that the Mud Dauber Wasps that have built nests all over the eaves of our house may be responsible for the disappearance of the Monarch caterpillars.  (Caution:  that article is fairly graphic--don't read it if you're squeamish--it's like something out of "Alien").

The good news about these wasps is that they prefer to use spiders, especially Black Widows, to feed their larvae; the bad news is that they will also use butterfly caterpillars.  That's O.K. with us if the caterpillars are the larvae of the Tomato Hornworm, laid by the Sphinx Moth, but not O.K. if it's our Monarch caterpillars.

So, to protect at least some of the Monarch caterpillars, we finally bought a butterfly cage, a soft-sided mesh cage to protect them.  The cage has a clear plastic side and three mesh sides, one of which has a zipper to form a door on that side so you can open the cage.

Last Tuesday we put two fairly large Monarch caterpillars into it with some of the Asclepia in a bud vase with water.  Cindy wound plastic wrap around the stems of the plants so the caterpillars wouldn't crawl in and drown, which was probably a good precaution:  I don't think they can swim.  Then the next day we found two more caterpillars and moved them in, using a rose bud vial with a rubber lid.  We put stones in the bottom to keep the whole thing from blowing over in the wind.

By Friday the first caterpillar had crawled off the plants and attached to the cage to form a chrysalis.  Naturally, since nothing is ever easy, Numero Uno decided to attach and form his chrysalis very close to the zipper, which made it very difficult to open the cage to put fresh plants for caterpillars Two and Three.  Number four was very small and we never found out what happened to him, but Two and Three were eating everything in sight, so we had to slide the fresh plants in very carefully.

So that's the story so far.  Today Number Two is crawling all over the cage, looking for a suitable place to attach (NOT near the zipper, PLEASE!), and Number Three is still eating everything is sight and will probably attach soon, too.      

No Caterpillars

A few days after my post about the Anise Swallowtail caterpillars we found devouring the parsley leaves, they all disappeared.

One of the caterpillars was huge; he was obviously just about ready to find a place to attach and form a chrysalis, but the other two were smaller.  Since it looked like they prefer to attach to an upright twig or branch, we put a garden stake in the ground among the parsley, but it doesn't look like any have attached to it.

So the pack of boisterous Scrub Jays that were hanging around the suet feeder, or one of the brown California Towhees probably got all the caterpillars.

Too bad, we were looking forward to trying to watch them hatch.

Scrub Jays

Love Those Peanuts!

We've enjoyed watching the Western Scrub Jays that hang out in the canyon shrubbery and visit our suet feeder, so we shouldn't have been too surprised to see one hop on to the top of the peanut feeder we have out in the area behind the fence.

We had just hung up a holder for nesting materials, thinking the hummingbirds and Lesser Goldfinches would find it there, but the Scrub Jay obviously thought we had refilled the thing with peanuts.

We got the hint and moved the nesting materials to a different location and filled the feeder with unshelled peanuts.  Then we hung around and waited to see how long it took for the Jay to reappear.  I hadn't gone ten steps before a Jay appeared in the bushes, and within another ten the bird was up on the feeder.  Within a minute it had pried a peanut out and flown off with it.

When we put peanuts out like this, they're usually gone within a day.  I don't know what they do with all those peanuts, but I don't think they could eat them all at once, so they must be stashing them somewhere to eat later.

We have nightmare visions of rampant legumes all over our hillside from Scrub Jay stashes.

Update:  by the end of the day:  not one single peanut was left in the feeder.

All Gone

Damn.  I am so bummed out.  Shortly after I published the post yesterday about the remaining Monarch Butterfly caterpillar, I went out to take another look at it and it was gone.  It had stripped off most of the leaves on the stem it was on, so it was pretty much exposed, as was one of them the day before, so we're thinking the birds got them all.

But which bird?  Was it one of the House Finches?  The Bushtits that are flocking in the neighbor's Trumpet Creeper right now?  The shy, reclusive California Thrasher that flits in and out of the hedge to break off chunks of suet?  Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick?

My money's on the Scrub Jay.  Members of the Corvid family, they are highly intelligent and opportunistic birds.  Cindy had just hung a feeder full of peanuts out because we knew there was at least one around, so we're guessing the Jay just thought we were providing yet another tasty snack for it.

While we were watching the Monarch Butterfly flitting around and looking at the caterpillar earlier in the afternoon, Cindy had made the remark that maybe we should take the remaining caterpillar into protective custody, but unfortunately we didn't actually do that.  Lesson learned, too late.

So now we will move the Asclepia to the front yard, where there is less cover for birds.  They tend to hang around the feeders in the back yard, so future butterfly larvae should have a better chance of survival.  And maybe eventually we'll get to see the whole metamorphosis process.