Butterflies help teach life lessons to 3-year-old
WINFIELD TWP — They are dependent on you for food and shelter. You help them through the stages of their childhood. And when they leave home, you can't make choices for them anymore.
That's the lesson 3-year-old Kenzie Mitchell learned last week when she released the first monarch butterfly she and her grandmother had raised.
“We let it go. We were trying to get it to go into the flower garden. It wouldn't go. It just went into the big tree,” said Kenzie.
Kenzie and her grandmother, Brenda Roush, have been spending the summer raising monarch butterflies from eggs, and their first “graduate” left the nest last week.
Roush said, “A friend of ours put on Facebook she was raising monarchs on milkweed last year.
“We went out and got a couple of caterpillars,” said Roush.
This year, Roush bought a mesh butterfly cage and started stalking milkweed patches to collect eggs, caterpillars and plants for the caterpillars to munch on.
Right now, she and Kenzie are caring for 38 potential butterflies in caterpillar and chrysalis stages.Roush, who watches Kenzie five days a week, thought it would be a good way to capture the interest of her active granddaughter.“For Kenzie, she's very into it. She can tell you every stage (of caterpillar life)“She stays interested. She fussed all day before we let the first butterfly go,” she said.When the monarch had finally emerged from the chrysalis and its wings were dry, Roush said, “She sticks her hand in there. She wasn't scared for it to land on her finger.”Roush said monarch butterflies go through life stages: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis and adult.And the rasing and feeding, which entails gathering milkweed for her caterpillars to munch on, brings them even more eggs and caterpillars.
Roush and Kenzie have their favorite spots where they gather milkweed to bring home to the butterfly cage in Roush's kitchen.Kenzie said, “We find them on Spiker Road.And attached to the milkweed are often tiny eggs and caterpillars, which add to the population already back home.Monarch eggs, attached to the underside of milkweed leaves, are tiny black balls, and the just-hatched caterpillars aren't much bigger.Eggs hatch into caterpillars that eat and grow for two weeks.Then, Roush said, “The caterpillars climb up to the top of the cage, anchor themselves into a “J form”curl and form a chrysalis around themselves.“After 7 to 14 days in the chrysalis, the butterfly will come out,” she said.A monarch will live for four to six weeks, except for the generation that migrates to Mexico — they can live for up to nine months.“I would love to see a herd of butterflies before we let them go,” said Roush.So would Dr. Chip Taylor of Monarch Watch, a nonprofit group associated with the University of Kansas occupied with tagging the butterflies during their migrations south and promoting “monarch way stations,” gardens filled with favorite monarch plants.Taylor said that, while in breeding areas, the prospects for a normal summer and a reasonably robust population look quite good,
“The exception is the northeast (east of Toronto in Canada, and most of eastern New York, Pennsylvania and north through New England).“The colonization of those areas by first generation monarchs was scanty with low temperatures for the first half of June. Further, a colder-than-normal summer is predicted for most of that region which will retard population development,” he said. “The migration in the East this fall will be on the low side relative to good years.”Roush said she really notices when milkweed areas have been mowed or sprayed by road crews. She wonders how many eggs or caterpillars are destroyed.“Did I know I would be obsessed?” said Roush. “You have to go get milkweed that you have to bring home. It's become an obsession when you are stopping along the road looking for milkweed.”Kenzie doesn't see it that way.“I like the butterflies and the caterpillars together,” she said.
