Butterfly Visitors, Part 2
—Queen & American Snout Butterflies (Plus Some Special Excitement!)
Ironically, yesterday, just as I was beginning to review this post (which starts with my art of a Queen Butterfly emerging a.k.a. eclosing), I was distracted by another Queen Butterfly about to eclose on one of our Milkweeds!
Last week I shared my Perpetual Journal art of three Queen Butterfly chrysalises in three different locations in our yard. Here’s my PJ art of one of these Queens emerging from its chrysalis. This was the Queen whose chrysalis was attached to a fence.
I also enjoyed seeing hundreds of American Snout Butterflies in our yard, especially in October, so I featured one of those in my PJ the following week.
An American Snout’s elongated mouth part (that pointy part you see above) helps it look like a dead leaf. I’ve read that American Snouts often take advantage of this camouflage by hanging upside down under a twig—just as I saw and illustrated in my PJ.
The American Snout, when its wings are closed, looks fairly monochromatic, with a speckly texture. For those of you interested in my art process (that’s all of you, right? 😉), I decided to use very short strokes with colored pencils, instead of my usual watercolor, to depict this speckly texture.
When the American Snouts open their wings, you can see their beautiful orange markings. Here’s a photo I took of an American Snout on our Desert Broom—the American Snouts flock to these plants when they’re in bloom!
Some Special Excitement
You may remember last week I mentioned that when a butterfly chrysalis becomes transparent, that’s our cue that the butterfly will eclose within the next day. This past Sunday, one of our Queen Butterfly chrysalises had turned very transparent overnight, and I thought, “Gee, why don’t I take a photo of this chrysalis for my blog, to show my readers what “transparent” really looks like?”
So here’s my photo of the Queen chrysalis, in all its transparent glory, with another Queen chrysalis, still green, in the background to the left. In the transparent chrysalis, you can see the orange of the butterfly’s wings as well as the white dots and black edging of the wings.
As if that weren’t cool enough, less than a minute after I took that photo the butterfly started eclosing!!! Faster than a Jackrabbit, I ran to the back door to yell to Hubby “TheQueen’sGonnaEclose!!!!!” and then started taking more photos (with Hubby joining me a nanosecond later)!
Watching a butterfly eclose is awesome and amazing—I’ve had the good fortune to witness this miracle a few times!
The following photos of the butterfly emerging from its chrysalis were all taken within a time span of 2 minutes.
1 of 6: My first clue the butterfly was about to eclose was seeing the chrysalis start to break open at the bottom.
2 of 6: The chrysalis opened more and the head started coming out of the chrysalis. Butterflies are positioned head-down in their chrysalises.
3 of 6: You can see the head and the wings starting to emerge even more from the chrysalis.
4 of 6: Now the head and wings are further out.
5 of 6: Since the butterfly’s still upside down, once it’s out of the chrysalis it flips over so its head is up and abdomen is down.
6 of 6: Hooray! The butterfly is now completely out of the chrysalis and right side up! At this point it will literally hang out for a few hours as its wings continue to unfold.
About 10 minutes after this photo sequence, the butterfly had unfolded its wings more and looked similar to my Queen butterfly art above!
Keen-eyed Hubby noticed that the butterfly was having trouble climbing, and it fell a few inches soon after it eclosed. Hubby did an amazing job of gently offering the butterfly a small twig to climb back on, and then Hubby raised the twig to a higher branch so that the butterfly could hang out there and dry off—it was still in the unfolding-its-wings stage. Upon further inspection we saw that the butterfly was missing one of its legs and the leg was still stuck in the chrysalis. ☹️ As far as we could tell, the missing leg didn’t affect the butterfly’s ability to fly.
I always bow to our recently eclosed butterflies, thanking them for gracing our yard with their beauty. I bowed twice to this butterfly, for also allowing us to witness it eclosing 😍!
*WHEW* I think that’s enough excitement for today!!! 🤗
“Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.”
- Chuang Tzu, Chinese philosopher
Thank you for being here! I appreciate it. See you next week!
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Oh my, what a good story, it makes me happy reading and seeing the art, photos showing this beautiful creature transforming, its rescue, the 5th photo motion capture when the butterfly righted itself--all special.