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Hatched! Ken the caterpillar has turned into a lovely swallowail butterfly. Sadly at the wrong time of year, so the chances of survival are low. I'd hoped he'd overwinter.
And Egbert, whom I raised from tiny tiny tiny, has just pupated, but I will spare you the photos of yet another swallowtail chrysalis.
This is the last swallowtail chrysalis. I now have three, plus one very tiny caterpillar that I'm not sure will make it. This is a very beautiful green colour with yellow points — the others started off like this too, and gradually turned a leafy brown colour, so I guess that's what will happen with this one as well. They will overwinter and come out as butterflies in the spring. My naturalist friend Andrea has told me to keep them in the light (not to put them out of the way in a wardrobe), as the cycle of day and night is essential to their circadian rhythms and is what will let them know when it's time to emerge. So the next time I post about them it will be springtime.
It's Blog Action Day 2009, and these are the latest pictures of my swallowtail butterfly caterpillars Basil and Bob — now preparing to pupate. Very exciting. This year Blog Action Day is about climate change, and I'm proud to have Basil and Bob helping me on this.
Let's think of caterpillars as among the forgotten victims of climate change. It goes like this: as the world warms, the characteristics of habitats change. Spring comes earlier perhaps; the patterns of the rains change; winter comes later and is milder, or the cold snaps are fiercer and at the wrong time. All this plays havoc with the butterfly's (caterpillar's) life cycle. Butterflies lay their eggs on a specific food plant, so that when the caterpillars hatch they can begin to eat immediately. They need to eat and eat and eat for weeks on end — and they need to eat that specific plant. (Basil and Bob ate a lot of my fennel patch.) If the plant's life cycle is altered because the climate is warmer, say, or wetter — well, the caterpillar loses its source of food, and can't survive. Butterflies can expand or move their habitats and colonize where the climate is more favourable relatively quickly, but plants take years or decades to move any significant distance, for deeply obvious reasons. (Ok: no feet.) Plants will lag behind animals in moving as the climate warms; animals will lose food sources and plants will lose pollinators and seed distributors. Whole food chains will be disrupted in subtle but far-reaching ways.
I'm not much of a scientist, but it hardly needs saying that if caterpillars disappear, then so do the creatures that feed on them, and so on down the line. On this green planet we're all linked together. Nothing, really, is too small to be left unconsidered. So, save the caterpillars: if they go, we go — only more noisily, and with a whole lot more pain.
Here is Ken in his new incarnation as a chrysalis! A beautiful pale green one with gold flecks. (Hard to get a good photo through the glass jar.) When he comes out as a swallowtail butterfly, will he still be Ken?
Grim sleety day today. Yesterday, which was cold but bright and clear, we saw that the first snow had fallen on the high mountains.
Hot news on the caterpillar front. Ken is definitely in chrysalis-making position: he's curled himself onto a sturdy bit of fennel stem and has lashed the stem to the glass and himself to the stem using strands of silky cobweb-like stuff. He is fastened there by his mouth (?) and his bottom, as well as having a sort of sling around his midriff. Every now and again he twists and wriggles a couple of times in a very slightly alarming manner, so something is going on inside him. I've seen this happen on an incredible video on YouTube ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2cE86AA1q0 ), where the caterpillar shucks off its caterpillar skin to reveal inside, already formed, the chrysalis. I think that's what will happen with Ken. The other big green one, Boris, has been motionless for a day as well but is looking less deliberately placed and more like he just stopped where he was for a rest. The other two are now huge — just as big as Boris and Ken — but their coloration is still predominantly black rather than green. I don't know why they haven't turned green, but they look healthy enough and are eating huge quantities of fennel. Tiny tiny Egbert has reached the heady length of 1cm and is really fairly visible without having to squint.
In other news: the weather has turned, dramatically, and we're now in the full depths of autumn. Big storms yesterday with torrential rain and horizontal winds; lots of branches down all over the roads and the fields running with water. It was 25 degrees on Sunday; today it's 9. Something of a shock to the system. When I went out to feed the animals at 7.15 this morning I put on my new, bargain, fake-sheepskin-lined wellies from Lidl for the first time, to find that the lovely warm lining goes down only as far as the ankle and that the whole of the foot part is completely unlined. What the hell is the point of that? But the air smelt amazing as I hunted about for wild fennel in the meadow — the fennel itself (smelling of curry), wild mint, hay and all sorts of other grassy, herby smells mixed in — brought out by the rain. If only my feet had been warmer I'd have been pretty damn happy.
Did I mention the egg? I found it a few days ago attached to a strand of fennel and brought it in to see if it would hatch (yet another jar). It was tiny — about 0.5mm diameter — and yellow. Yesterday morning it had turned a dark bluish-black colour. This morning it had disappeared, and there was a tiny, tiny caterpillar in the jar. It's about 2mm long. I've given it some more fennel and it's munching through it. The other caterpillars are growing. I had to separate the two big ones (Boris and Ken) as they had a fight!
Also have what's either a painted lady or a red admiral chrysalis sojourning in a mixing-bowl in the kitchen — if it's the red admiral it may well overwinter in this state, whereas if it's the painted lady the butterfly should emerge in the next day or so. Either way, I need my mixing-bowl back.
Haha, those two were just babies. Look at th
eir big brother that I found this morning! I went to pick some leaves for the littl'uns to eat and there h
e was. So this one I found on a stand of wild fennel at the edge of the field, but as the leaves were a bit sparse I then went down to the veg patch to get some leaves from our cultivated fennel (doing very well this year, by the way), and as I inspected the row, I found it pretty much crawling with caterpillars, in all stages of their development. They're veeeery pretty but they are eating a lot. John wants to disinfest the crop but I feel rather attached to them now and no way can we just squish 'em. That would be murder. A re-homing project looms.
Found these little beasties in the fennel as I was weeding amongst it. After much research on the Net I reckon they're going to turn into a kind of swallowtail butterfly (Papilio machaon, if anyone's interested). They're in a relatively early stage of their caterpillar childhood and should go through two or three more stages before they turn into a chrysalis. I hope to nurture them up to that point and then overwinter them in an attractive home made of a former Nutella jar, and then give them lots of fresh fennel leaves to wake up to next spring, when they should hatch out as lovely swallowtail butterflies.
Here's hoping.
Hatched! Ken the caterpillar has turned into a lovely swallowail butterfly. Sadly at the wrong time of year, so the chances of survival are low. I'd hoped he'd overwinter. 
This is the last swallowtail chrysalis. I now have three, plus one very tiny caterpillar that I'm not sure will make it. This is a very beautiful green colour with yellow points — the others started off like this too, and gradually turned a leafy brown colour, so I guess that's what will happen with this one as well. They will overwinter and come out as butterflies in the spring. My naturalist friend Andrea has told me to keep them in the light (not to put them out of the way in a wardrobe), as the cycle of day and night is essential to their circadian rhythms and is what will let them know when it's time to emerge. So the next time I post about them it will be springtime.
It's Blog Action Day 2009, and these are the latest pictures of my swallowtail butterfly caterpillars Basil and Bob — now preparing to pupate. Very exciting. This year Blog Action Day is about climate change, and I'm proud to have Basil and Bob helping me on this. 
Here is Ken in his new incarnation as a chrysalis! A beautiful pale green one with gold flecks. (Hard to get a good photo through the glass jar.) When he comes out as a swallowtail butterfly, will he still be Ken? 
Hot news on the caterpillar front. Ken is definitely in chrysalis-making position: he's curled himself onto a sturdy bit of fennel stem and has lashed the stem to the glass and himself to the stem using strands of silky cobweb-like stuff. He is fastened there by his mouth (?) and his bottom, as well as having a sort of sling around his midriff. Every now and again he twists and wriggles a couple of times in a very slightly alarming manner, so something is going on inside him. I've seen this happen on an incredible video on YouTube ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2cE86AA1q0 ), where the caterpillar shucks off its caterpillar skin to reveal inside, already formed, the chrysalis. I think that's what will happen with Ken. The other big green one, Boris, has been motionless for a day as well but is looking less deliberately placed and more like he just stopped where he was for a rest. The other two are now huge — just as big as Boris and Ken — but their coloration is still predominantly black rather than green. I don't know why they haven't turned green, but they look healthy enough and are eating huge quantities of fennel. Tiny tiny Egbert has reached the heady length of 1cm and is really fairly visible without having to squint.
Did I mention the egg? I found it a few days ago attached to a strand of fennel and brought it in to see if it would hatch (yet another jar). It was tiny — about 0.5mm diameter — and yellow. Yesterday morning it had turned a dark bluish-black colour. This morning it had disappeared, and there was a tiny, tiny caterpillar in the jar. It's about 2mm long. I've given it some more fennel and it's munching through it. The other caterpillars are growing. I had to separate the two big ones (Boris and Ken) as they had a fight!
eir big brother that I found this morning! I went to pick some leaves for the littl'uns to eat and there h
e was. So this one I found on a stand of wild fennel at the edge of the field, but as the leaves were a bit sparse I then went down to the veg patch to get some leaves from our cultivated fennel (doing very well this year, by the way), and as I inspected the row, I found it pretty much crawling with caterpillars, in all stages of their development. They're veeeery pretty but they are eating a lot. John wants to disinfest the crop but I feel rather attached to them now and no way can we just squish 'em. That would be murder. A re-homing project looms.
Found these little beasties in the fennel as I was weeding amongst it. After much research on the Net I reckon they're going to turn into a kind of swallowtail butterfly (Papilio machaon, if anyone's interested). They're in a relatively early stage of their caterpillar childhood and should go through two or three more stages before they turn into a chrysalis. I hope to nurture them up to that point and then overwinter them in an attractive home made of a former Nutella jar, and then give them lots of fresh fennel leaves to wake up to next spring, when they should hatch out as lovely swallowtail butterflies.
