Its Monarch season again!! For many years now, when it gets to be late September or early October, we grab our butterfly nets to be ready for the monarchs to stop by on their way to Mexico! We buy 'tags,' which are like little round stickers that have numbers on them that go on the butterfly's wing. The organization called Monarch Watch that sells the tags keeps track of how many there are, and where they came from.
You can tell if the butterfly is a boy or a girl by opening the wings to see if there are two black dots at the base of the bottom wings. If there are then its a male, like the butterfly below.
The caterpillars like to eat milkweed, so a lot of times thats where we find them. Sometimes I will put them in my little cage thingy and watch them grow, and sometimes get to see them change into a chrysalis and hatch out of it.
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| monarch caterpillar |
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| the chrysalis |
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| The male monarch butterfly |
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| migrating butterflies |
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| tagged and ready to fly! |
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| as you can see, we really have been doing this a long time! |
Aww! That's a cute picture of you when you were younger. :-) Were you able to tag a lot of butterflies this year?
ReplyDeleteMom didn't buy tags this year since the Monarch population is down, but I still went out and caught a few!
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