Monarch Farm: Update

I admit to being deeply skeptical of this. Not that it could be done, but that I could do it.

Milkweed, while not enjoying being pulled out of the ground, even with its own dirt, is droopy but hanging in there, and we have numerous caterpillars! I've been bring them in from the garden as well.

Finn is still finding it interesting and engaging.

It's all very pleasing.

Monarch Farm

No, I am not talking about a pastoral compound where the children of royalty are raised far away from the stinking peasants, being groomed to take over the ceremonial duties of state with aplomb and inbreeding.

I'm talking butterflies!

A few days ago, I saw my first monarch of the season, a couple of days ago, I found some eggs, and this morning, a friend posted a picture of her wee caterpillars going to town on milkweed. In the comments, someone mentioned that she had brought in eggs just that morning, and a discussion followed that included parasitic wasps, exploding caterpillars, and joy-filled children handling sleepy, damp butterflies.

I poked around a (very) little bit on the oracle, and found a page that tells you how to raise these little guys and gals inside your house. This was appealing to me for a number of reasons. For one, my common milkweed comes up everywhere, including the driveway, and I try to get those out before the eggs show up. Bringing them inside meant that I could both remove the giant plant and save the eggs. Everybody wins! For two, in the past, I have grown very attached to what I come to consider My Caterpillars, and have experienced great sadness and rage when they are, say, attacked and devoured by vicious little evil red ants.

For three, in the past few years, I have noticed a great decline in all my usual butterflies, and I have not seen any caterpillars, so the idea that I could finally show the boy this whole process was perhaps the best part.

The blog I was reading suggests that you can put the leaf bearing the egg into a plastic container, but we chose to dig up a few whole plants, as we have a tall butterfly pavilion (which is not necessary, it was just laying around here at the house), and I wanted to remove the plants anyway. I will probably seek out other eggs and use the leaf-removal system from here on in.

Finn and I stepped out and examined many of the common milkweed plants that are poking their noses into undesirable garden spots and found three or four eggs. We dug up the plants and put them into used plastic containers and put the whole set-up into the butterfly pavilion. The whole operation took less than 15 minutes, and I was treated to an impromptu song from the boy about working together, doing things together, because we love each other. He also exclaimed "I love that we are doing this!"

Yeah. That pretty much melts my cold heart of stone.

So here I sit, at my kitchen table, a butterfly pavilion full of milkweed at my elbow. And I can already feel my maternal protectiveness setting in. I'll probably be checking these plants ten times a day and worrying about the eggs and subsequent caterpillars when I wake up in the middle of the night.

Fort Snelling State Park: Storytime & Spiders

I have to say that while Finn does not mind having the lady rangers to himself, come on, caregivers! We were the only ones here again.
This event happens every Monday morning, and you should be here. Indoor story time is for winter. This week, we learned about what to do if you should find a baby Great Horned Owl in your backyard. Personally, I found most of this story to be implausible or all-too-convenient (baby owl is found by the children of a wildlife rehabilitator), but we definitely learned from it, and Finn found it interesting.

Later, after we hit the beach and the playground, we attended a spider talk, and there were other people present for this, which was nice. First we had a presentation from Ranger Amie inside the visitor center, and we found out:

-Birds eat spiders
-A black widow bite will make you sore all over, but you won't die.
-Mites will attach themselves to spiders and feed on them.
-Spiders eat spiders.
-Wasps eat spiders and will lay their eggs in them.


-Spiders eat mosquitoes, which makes them heroes and heroines.
-All spiders have fangs, 2 body parts, eight legs, eight or six eyes, and an innate ability to terrify the majority of humans.
-All spiders have venom and are poisonous, but it's mostly only poisonous to bugs.
-Male spiders have pedipalps, which are a combination of mating organ and arms, and they use them to do stuff, which is truly multi-tasking. And truly gross if you extend that concept to humans.
-Spiders' legs are attached to the head.
-Spiders are arachnids, and so are scorpions, mites, and daddy long legs (shiver)*. Daddy long legs have a single body part and don't produce silk.

Other interesting facts include that in the US, spiders are lone wolves and live by themselves because (see above) spiders will eat other spiders. Tarantulas are not true spiders because their fangs come down, not from the side. You might get bit by a tarantula, but you won't get hurt. Minnesota's poisonous spiders are the Northern Black Widow and the Brown Recluse. (Which didn't live here before, but thank you, climate change!) The Brown Recluse is gray or brown, has no markings on body, but a marking on the head that looks like a violin (or a fiddle, if the spider has attitude). If you are bitten by a brown recluse, the wound will take at least three months to heal. Put an ice pack on it to keep the venom from spreading, and go to the hospital.

At this point in the talk, I realized that I was spending too much time trying to figure out what kind of spider Shelob is. She makes silk and seems to make sheet webs (flat, convex or concave, only edges are sticky) or irregular cobwebs (no pattern, not sticky, spider sits in the middle), but her silk is definitely sticky, and not all of the 7 types of silk are. (There are four kinds of webs. Funnel webs are like a sheet web but with a hole in the middle, and orb webs are the classic spider webs, the webs that make all other spiders jealous. They have vertical spokes, which are not sticky, and spirals, which are. It takes a spider about 20 minutes to make one, and they rebuild them every day or so.) But spiders that live on webs are almost blind, and Shelob certainly can see. And talk.

I would not be at all surprised if she eats her silk and reuses it, as spiders do. She's an active hunter and jumping spider, but those species do not build webs, only the occasional trip wire to warn them when prey is near. They see well and do a mating dance, which I really can't see Shelob enjoying. For web-building spiders, the male plucks the lady spider's web so she will know he's not food. Active hunters have different silk glands, and they make cottony little, white swabs for their babies.

Speaking of babies, they can't stay in the nest long after they are hatched because their siblings will eat them, so they practice "ballooning," casting one line of silk to get themselves to safety. You've walked through them on your travels in the woods.

Non-mythical spiders live 2-3 years and can have three thousand spiderlings, 2-3 hundred in a single egg sac. Which is something to think about just before you fall asleep.

After the presentation, we went outside to find spiders around and on the visitor center. No Shelob, but as I think she's tarantula-adjacent, she's not a "true spider" anyway.

Don't tell her I said that.

*I have loathed daddy long legs since I was a small child. They used to march through our house at one point every year, and I remember not wanting to walk down the hall to my room because one was hanging out on the wall, in my way.