The birds continue to thrive in our little lot. I watch the frequent visits by the chickadee parents to their birdhouse as I was work in my garden. When are they going to fledge? The excited chirps of the nestling titmice grow in volume each day. The traffic at our suet feeder has seemed to increase - catbirds, blue jays, titmice, chickadees, downy woodpeckers, a red bellied woodpecker,  a nuthatch, and of course, squirrels.

There is undeniable magic in metamorphosis. It is a magic that captivates at the earliest of ages, and it has the ability to fill one with wonder throughout a lifetime. It is for this reason that you will find children observing and facilitating the process in classrooms all over the country.

 At the Rocky Hill Cooperative Nursery School, preschoolers enjoy the magic under the nurturing guidance of Director Gerianne Linden. Gerianne’s love of the natural world parallels that of her charges. Together she and her students embrace the wonder through so many different activities in the school. This includes raising painted lady caterpillars into butterflies.

In this modern age, it is relatively easy to find and raise a variety of creatures at home or in the classroom. Kits for amphibians or butterflies can be found on the open marketplace through a variety of vendors. It is important to consider carefully before making a purchase - what do we do with the creatures that we raise when they are through growing up? Are they native to my location? Can they be released into the wild? I fear that too often these details are overlooked.

When I was a child, one had to be a little crafty and apply a little naturalist intelligence in order to find and locate a creature to raise. Children are adept at finding caterpillars but most will simply add grass to the container and consider them set. After all, if a caterpillar is a vegetarian, it must eat green! But in reality, most caterpillars have specific plants, or a range of plants, that they consider food.  Look carefully and you will find that in many instances, this is a relatively easy thing to discover. The challenge for making the match will come from caterpillars that have fallen from the trees, or caterpillars on the move, like wooly bears in early autumn.

So back in Rocky Hill and innumerable other classrooms, tiny caterpillars came supplied with a provision of a sort of caterpillar “space food”. Real food has been incorporated into an agar substrate, thus eliminating the need to identify and locate the specific plant required to feed your caterpillar.   This strange but relatively fool-proof method of feeding your caterpillars has put the magic of metamorphosis into a huge number of classrooms.

What the students witness in these classrooms is a miraculous transformation. Tiny featureless caterpillars grow, become larger, more colorful, and in this case, ornate. Eventually, they climb and hang in the shape of a letter “j”. This is when the real drama begins.  

Soon each of the hanging caterpillars splits its skin and transforms into a chrysalis, a transitional phase before becoming a butterfly. Days later, an even more dramatic change takes place as the chrysalis splits and a butterfly emerges.

I will never tire of this transformation. I will never tire of sharing it with others - my friends and family at home, and visitors at the Buttinger Nature Center. I am grateful that the Nursery School visited the Nature Center, with their butterflies, sharing their excitement. They also shared their butterflies, releasing them into the Butterfly House where they can completed the cycle all over again We are watching for mating butterflies right now.  With a little luck, they will breed and soon lay eggs and then . . .