butterflies and frogs

This morning, butterflies and frogs surfaced in the same thought.

I'd never thought about them having much in common, but here we are, two formerly common backyard creatures who in their youth are completely different lifeforms than in their adulthood.

Butterflies and Frogs. Now, step back a week or two and consider Caterpillars and Tadpoles.

There is some kind of true magic that occurs in the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly. Here you have the caterpillar, with this huge appetite, spending days walking up and down stems and leaves, walking and munching, walking and munching. As long as there are plenty of leaves and not so much bad weather as to get washed away, the caterpillar has the good life. Then, one day, caterpillar, much larger and very healthy, looks a little sluggish, body moving more slowly. It's almost like - well, this is good, but what else is there? Munching slows down, slows down until caterpillar stops eating. Then, I don't know how it happens. Maybe the biologists know but I don't. Because there it is, a caterpillar hanging onto a stem, and then, with no added ingredients, and you can watch it happen, there's no longer a caterpillar there but a chrysalis, like a colorful piece of luggage dangling on a stem; no face, legs or anything like that is evident. Then, a few days later, a fabulous creature unfolds, a butterfly. The air dries its wings a bit, and it takes flight, like an expert pilot who has already put in his 200 hours of training flight. No practice hours at being a butterfly. There's no such thing as a baby butterfly.

Given how plentiful butterflies have been on earth, its surprising how few humans have ever watched this take place. We have to remind ourselves when these wormy-looking bugs are eating all the leaves off our tomato plants that to kill a caterpillar is to also kill the butterfly or moth.

Years back, a friend gave me this gorgeous plant that grew and grew and flowered into double trumpets, the blooms purple on the exterior and white on the interior. The blooms were a good six or seven inches long, or maybe even longer. The plant thrived in a large pot on the deck.

One day, these caterpillars show up, and they're doing the main caterpillar thing which is, as stated above, walk and munch, walk and munch. I figure nervously, well, there are lots of leaves here, this is ok. But the leaves start disappearing, and the caterpillars are growing huge, and they look more like enemy than co-inhabitant. So I try moving them elsewhere, but I feel bad because I know the elsewhere doesn't have the special leaves this particular type of caterpillar requires to become this particular type of butterfly or moth and I don't know whether the caterpillars will survive.

The next spring, the same thing happens. Same kind of caterpillar on the same plant (whose name I may remember before finishing typing this story). But this time, I'm not going to take the caterpillars away. I figure nature must have an answer here, otherwise, either the plants or the caterpillars wouldn't survive into the future.

The caterpillars eat every cotton-pickin leaf off that plant.

Oh no! I must have been wrong, very very wrong. The huge plant that had such gorgeous foliage and was soon to bloom was now - well - a nude stick.

The caterpillars, more exposed now walking on the bare branches, are picked off one by one by a local mockingbird. Oy!

Time passes. A couple of weeks later, I see the plant is covered again with fresh foliage, more dense and lush than ever before. The huge blooms come about, with their frilled edges, inviting large pollinators.

The next year, year three, caterpillars - the same kind - show up again. Maybe some of the previous caterpillars were not devoured by birds, and made it to the chrysalis state. And the datura (I said I'd remember its name) foliage is consumed again. It leafs out again.

I wish I knew what kind of moth or butterfly emerges - something big, to judge by the size of these caterpillars when full grown. I didn't remember the part about the mockingbirds until the last minute, and thought I'd leave it out, since the mockingbird certainly complicates the story. But that's how nature is, a complicated story with lots of characters and their appetites and habits interwoven into the big picture.

The kids watched the transformation process more closely at Montessori preschool with milkweed, and with caterpillars that emerge as Monarch butterflies. And it was my oldest son, who was four or five at the time, who pointed out milkweed growing in the wild on a walk one day, and found a tiny caterpillar to show me, and told me what it would turn into. And at some later date, like at their school, we watched it happen in a jar at home.

I have to admit, I get rather attached to the caterpillar, who is there every morning, walk and munch, and who fleshes out so impressively. There's a bit of grieving when it slows to a halt and melts into something so different. The butterfly that emerges is beautiful, and such a flyer, but does not remain but a few hours before flying away. Monarch butterflies are migratory, and do a kind of relay thousands of miles long that carries them deep into Mexico at winter.

When I was a kid, it was popular to do the same sort of project at school, only watching tadpoles (which swim in ponds, streams and ditches like fish) grow legs and turn into frogs (which jump on land).

The butterflies mate in the air, the frogs at the water's edge. The females lay eggs which hatch into caterpillars and tadpoles, respectively. As long as no part of the process is interfered with, the cycle goes on and on, year after year, decade after decade, century after century.

Day before yesterday, I saw a large yellow butterfly flying in the backyard here in central Louisiana - so fast I couldn't tell what kind it was. It was beautiful, the first butterfly I've seen this spring.