Plant It and They Will Come #8 Migration 2015

The BSTs probably didn't form chrysalises on the parsley; I think all caterpillars crawl away from the food source to places that are more sheltered (e.g., shrubs) when they're ready to pupate.
The butterflies have been laying eggs on parsley and dill pretty recently, though! I was surprised to find some new little guys in my BST tent; they must have come in as eggs on the parsley flower heads I clipped off after finding cats on them.

Some of my Swallowtail cats....

I hope you're right about the parsley, Muddy, but it did make my yard less attractive to them. I still had the rue and fennel they used before but no takers. At the garden, they chose two plots. One is heavily planted with parsley and the other has a lot of carrots - two 4' rows. They didn't choose the plots with just a couple of this or that. So hopefully next year I'll get my act together with a strong planting of their favorites and see if they come back.

Do any of you get mourning cloaks? I haven't seen them since I was a kid. My neighbor had a willow tree next to the lake and it was full of their cats. In the town I live now which isn't far, there are willows next to a pond but I never saw a mourning cloak.

Great photos of the BST cats, Muddy!!

True, they tend to travel quite a ways when looking for a place to pupate, but that's all the more reason for me not to do any 'clean up' this fall!!

Loretta, I haven't seen any mourning cloaks either, although I would love to!

I have fennel seed planted, for me it's the easiest thing to grow that BST will use here.

Loretta, I remember as a kid being pretty sure I saw mourning cloaks. I can't say how good my ID skills were. That's when I played in the woods. I don't think I've seen any as an adult.

What are "mourning cloaks"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymphalis_antiopa

I haven't seen Mourning Cloaks around here either, but I'd like to. Maybe they'll gravitate to the Willow tree I planted near the creek when it gets bigger.

I wish I had grown more dill and parsley; I'm worried I won't have enough for my BST cats and apparently they don't care for store bought. They haven't gone for the Zizia aurea leaves I've given them, either, but I'm going to keep trying. I'm reaching out to neighbors to see if they're growing, too.

I have all this extra fennel but haven't seen a caterpillar on them in months.

Muddy--

I have a lot of Parsley growing. End of season--so i can cut a lot of stems off.

Are you still going to the "Native Plants" sale here? What time does it start?

You can easily pass by my house with no big detours.
I have my Class reunion on Saturday at 11AM. till???? at least 2-3 hours....
I can cut off a pile of Parsley stems and leave it by my front door.

Please D-mail me so we cam continue with this plan. Gita

Thanks so much for the offer, Gita, but a neighbor has plenty of fennel and parsley for the cats. Whew!

I'm doing okay for fennel, but have just used up the rest of the milkweed I got at the swap last weekend. Went out this evening to pick leaves from my tropical and boy they looked shorn already from the last crop of monarch cats! :-(

Do you need some milkweed? I've got plenty of that!

Yes, that would be wonderful! Thanks so much, Muddy!! Finally got a decent headcount, and I have 14 or 15 Monarch cats! 9 BST cats (but my fennel supply seems good).

I saw a Mourning Cloak for the first time this year sunning on the white banister of the back porch.

Haha....I thought a mourning cloak was something you wore at a funeral...

I'm glad I have MW to share! I'm grateful that my neighbor doesn't mind have an unruly patch of Common MW because although the Monarch cats will nibble on my Asclepias incarnata and perennis, they really only want the A. syriaca. In return for their letting me take whatever I want of not only MW but also Cilantro and Parsley (and to make the MW easier to get to!), I've been pulling out the Japanese Stiltgrass that's mixed in with it. They have a baby and preschooler and just do not have time to do that sort of chore.

Great trade of plantings and services Muddy1.

I have plenty of Japanese Stilt Grass and I got an email from a local native plant nursery saying the most effective way of getting rid of it is near the end of summer early fall when it starts to set seed.
They recommend mowing it down then before the seeds are released. It seems the seeds stay viable for 3 years in the soil so if you can remove the seed heads each year at the right time you will be stilt grass free in 3 years, provided you get all the seed heads.

Mine is mixed in with plantings like yours so I assume carefully pulling it at the right time will also work.
I usually remove it all through the growing season but if what they say is true I am wasting my time.
As long as it doesn't set seed I'll leave it until it does.

Is it an annual grass?

I believe it is.

Ok, thanks, I didn't know that.

Very interesting SSG!

Sempervirens, looks like you live near me so it's good to know they are still in North Jersey. Were willows and water in the area when you saw it?

I might have seen a mourning cloak at The Bark Park where I take my dog, I don't know. It was flying, looked like a butterfly and had white edges. Don't grasshoppers look like that when they are flying too? I lost sight of it before it landed in the willow tree.

At the community garden, I can't find any BST cats anymore! I think one of the members took them for her preschoolers.

No water ( except for 2 bird baths ) or willows Loretta, but lots of trees with crevices for them to hibernate.
The one I saw was probably a male sitting in the sun displaying to attract a female.

What I do have are 3 native large wild rose bushes ( they spread over a good size area), Rosa virginiana .
On some online sites wild rose is listed as a host shrub.
Maybe this was the attractor?

Unfortunately with the lack of rain I have quite a bit of die back of these roses.

This message was edited Sep 26, 2015 8:28 AM

Loretta, yes, grasshoppers will fly a surprising ways and their wings do have that edge.

I was away this weekend and so took my Monarch cats (16 total including 3 I took from another neighbor's MW plants) to a neighbor for care and feeding (same family who watched chrysalises for me last year). She and her girls were thrilled to have them and aren't in any hurry to give them back! The youngest had just watched Monarch cats transform into butterflies in her classroom. They said all but 2 or 3 are chrysalises, and they got to watch one pupate. We decided that they would keep them again tonight rather than bring the tent out in the rain.

Before I left town, CatMint came over to get some Common MW for her cats, and I asked her to take one of the Monarch cats, a tiny little one that was failing to thrive for some reason. It just would not eat, and I didn't want the neighbor and her young kids to have to deal with a poor sick cat. CatMint told me it didn't make it, as expected, but at least whatever was wrong with it didn't affect the others. Thanks for caring for it, CatMint!

My largest BST cats are about an inch long now, I think, based on the quick look I took while shoving fresh dill and parsley into the vases in their tent tonight.

There was a great story on npr today about monarch waystations in highway rest areas. What a great idea!

that's great. I wish we could continue to decrease highway mowing.

A big thanks to Muddy for all that wonderful milkweed, which has made my life so much more manageable over the past week! Sad about the little caterpillar. :-( Hopefully everyone else survives to happy butterflyhood!

Here I have 15 Monarchs--3 chrysalises, 1 in J position, and 11 big strapping caterpillars who look like they should be heading to the top to pupate rather than lounging around the milkweed! :-)

11 BST cats, including one chrysalis. There are 4 tiny early instars, and 6 bigger ones who look like they will be building their slings within the next week.

They really are fun!!

For all you butterfly loving women out there....

Um... Any volunteers to try out this eye make up?

Catmint! Show off the wonderful results of your eye surgery! 😜

LOL--yup, now all I need is a Halloween party to wear it to! :-D

I saw one medium-sized BST aterpillar on one of my parsley pots today!!
Must be a slacker! Why so late? The storm will do a number on it!
NOT full sized yet--kind of an adolescent--3rd Instar??

Have to check my other parsley's--I have so many....

G.

The BST caterpillar will hibernate over the winter as a pupa, Gita, so there's no need for it to rush.

I have 14 Monarch chrysalises and 2 in J position. 2 chrysalises fell already, so I had to sew them up. Another formed a chrysalis on the underside of a leaf, so I trimmed the leaf and sewed it to the tent.

Should I separate the 3 chrysalises in the first photo? Two are sharing a web and it doesn't looks as if it'll hold up. If it does, won't they be too close if they happen to eclose at the same time?

Here are some of my BST cats. I thought I had more; it's possible that some newly-hatched ones accidentally got eaten by the big ones.

Muddy, mine nearly always form their chrysalises in bunches--I think there must be something instinctive about that. They don't seem to bother each other when they eclose--they just hang there near each other and let their wings dry. And it's funny--watching them hang next to each other reminds me of the photos I've seen of them clustered together in their overwintering grounds in Mexico.

I think you're right about the ones hanging from the web--they look like they will need some help to stay up. Maybe do something preventive with them so they don't fall first? The one chrysalis I had fall in the last round never eclosed... :-(

Your BSTs are sure getting big! Looks like they should be looking for places to pupate soon... I've wondered the same thing at times about hatchlings, but then sometimes they pop up again later, only bigger! :-D They can be so hard to see, esp when there are a lot of leaves...

Muddy, as to your Monarch chrysalides:

First, I would not do anything that would disturb those in J position until after they are green and hard. If you are concerned about falling, put some thing in the tent that would break the fall and limit the fall distance to a couple inches then 4-5 inches as eclosure nears.

The one on the left does indeed look saggy. Thankfully, the ones I have raised have all anchored securely on their paper towels. The silk web buttons are hard to remove as the silk is quite strong. The closeness of the three does look OK as they are rotated from each other should they eclose at same time. Once the butterfly merges its two mouth parts to form the probiscis, it generally can then reposition itself on the shell for final stages of wing pump up and drying. I think one of the purposes of hanging in the J is to assure enough distance/space to safely eclose.

My current concern is that the nine I left for Wayne to finish feeding will be ready to emerge today through next week and I would hope for non torrential rains for their release. The longest I kept one or two late last Oct because of 'weather' was two days. Never did get them to 'nectar'
Need to read up on this or drive them a couple hundred miles where weather is better!

How close are any of you alls to possible emergence?

I'm expecting two this weekend, so I'm sure hoping they catch the southbound side of those hurricane swirly winds, and then spin of towards KY and beyond..

I have 4 recent chrysalises, so hopefully the weather will be better when they eclose...

I'm checking with "the other Robin" (my neighbor) to see when the first chrysalises formed. I'm sure the first 3 to pupate were the ones I found on my other neighbors' MW patch; they were really large. I'm hoping that none will emerge before next week.