First, I want to share a picture of the chrysalis while it was still beautiful and green, but looked completely different from the pictures on my earlier post. The picture is actually of a chrysalis outside because I didn’t take one of our inside chrysalis before it changed. It was also a Monarch, though. Notice the beautiful gold on the outside. It was very pretty.

This is a picture of the chrysalis the day the butterfly emerged.

Not five minutes later the boys were calling me to see the butterfly. This picture is of the butterfly immediately after coming out of the chrysalis. Its wings were still very wet.

The wings were drying in this one.

We took a few more pictures before letting it go. It flew up very high and lit in a poplar tree. As long as we stayed to watch, it never moved. I made sure that it was warm enough outside before we released it because they can’t fly if they are too cold. The butterfly should emerge from the chrysalis outside any day now and it, too should be on the way to Mexico for the winter. Check out this website. Make sure you look at the migration details. It’s truly amazing how far these little guys fly!

Tags: butterfly, chrysalis, Monarch

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Nature Study. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.