If you have been enjoying these stories and would like to read all of them in this book you can find it on Amazon in Kindle and paperback format. Butterfly Diary: The number of butterflies at the sunshine nectar bar, as I call our sedum plants, dwindled from twenty so that only two butterflies and a bumblebee visited on the day of the autumnal equinox. September Only one butterfly and the bumblebee showed up. I looked up the life span of butterflies.
The group of butterflies who came to the sedum plant were there for two or three weeks. They had their brief, avid fling of slurping up nectar during the warm, sunny days of September, and then disappeared. Sic transit gloria… Thus, passes glory. It would be nice to think so, but I doubt it. Our lives are so filled with getting, spending, working, face-booking, tweeting, and such that we take little notice of the quiet wonders of the seemingly simple creatures with whom we share planet Earth.
I had forgotten about the complex transformation during four distinct stages from egg to adult butterfly and how selective and sometimes inflexible nature is. Take the aptly named Monarch: an egg laid upon a milkweed leaf hatches into a caterpillar. No other plant will do. If the Monarch caterpillar munches another kind of leaf it will die.
The caterpillar voraciously eats and grows, shedding five skins. After it has grown enough, it attaches itself to a leaf by a silken web and becomes a pupa round which a hard chrysalis is spun and a change occurs inside the chrysalis at the end of which it will be a totally new being. For example, it loses some of its legs, and its mouth that chews becomes the slender proboscis that the butterfly inserts in flowers to sip nectar.
One day, the metamorphosis from what was a crawling, homely caterpillar into a winged, flying, ethereal butterfly is complete, and the lovely new being bursts forth. Butterflies develop according to a pre-ordained pattern and live their brief span governed by immutable natural laws. The awareness and the ability to introspect that we humans possess are both a blessing and a curse.
