A Final Glimpse of This Year's Monarch Butterfly Migration
Cycle one of our monarch butterfly restoration project is coming to a close here at Vermont Woods Studios. Over the past week and a half, our monarchs have been hatching one by one. The first, taking us by surprise with its ability to speedily release itself from its chrysalis. In just a short moment, the monarch broke through the chrysalis and pulled its damp body from the small structure. The Stonehurst staff monitored the fledgling butterfly excitedly as it clung to the shell of the chrysalis, drying slowly.
Eventually the butterfly dried itself and went off in search of food to prepare itself for its migration journey. One by one, our other chrysalises turned shiny and black and we knew it would only be a matter of days before all of our monarchs would be beautiful, bouncing, baby butterflies ready to fly off into the world.
We are proud and happy to see the caterpillars we raised turn into the delicate winged creatures they are today. In this first cycle of the project, we have seen the release of twenty monarch butterflies. Being the business people we are, we appreciate this achievement that we have reached but we also strive to do better in the future.
The end of the first cycle of this project gives way to the second cycle that will start almost immediately. Our CEO Peggy has been watching the milkweed pods carefully for a week now and has determined that the time has come for us to once again harvest the seeds. As we head quickly into the second cycle of monarch restoration, we hold in our minds ways to maximize the habitat restoration and amount of monarchs we will be able to foster and release in the spring.
We hope to harvest and distribute more seeds than last year. We plan to raise seedlings ourselves to give out in the spring time to those dedicated people who promise to plant them on their land. We are already percolating new ideas for monarch caterpillar rearing environments with hopes of a terrarium in the near future.
This year we took on 50 monarch caterpillars but we know we can handle more than that. The success of cycle one has given us fuel and ambition to make cycle two of this very important restoration project bigger and better.
(This is part four of a four part blog series on our Monarch Butterfly Restoration Project)
