Sometimes the drab color palette of the outdoors this time of year gets me down. Just in case you’re the same, I wanted to share some pictures I took of flowers in my yard over the past year. Most of the flowers I planted I chose because they attract birds or butterflies. I’m a nature lover and have a passion for amateur photography, so these pictures warm my heart even when it is cold outside. Ignore the fact that it neared seventy degrees in Georgia today!

On Saturday, we got up and decided to drive to a nearby park. It turned out to be even better than we could have imagined. We set out to identify trees using a field guide I had checked out from the library. I know the names of a lot of trees, but I wanted to try to name some I didn’t already know. As it turns out, the book I had was near impossible to use, so we gave up and I just told the boys the trees I recognized already. I guess I’ll be asking for a new field guide for my birthday or Christmas.

The leaves were absolutely gorgeous and when they reflected on the lake, it was twice as nice. Notice how the leaves blur together like a watercolor painting where the water is choppy and look like a perfect mirror image when it is still.

When we started out, there was a chill in the air, but as the day grew older, it warmed to a nice warm temperature…all in all, perfect weather for a day outside.

One of the boys noticed a furry little caterpillar crawling in the grass beside the trail and I took some pictures of it. I hope I identified it correctly. Using the bug guide, I picked the closest thing I could find.

While we were at Amicalola Falls, I took some pictures of the beautiful trees and I thought I would share a few of them. It was still a little early for all the trees to be changing, so there were still a lot of green leaves mixed in with the colorful ones.

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!

While I was washing dishes a few days ago, I saw caterpillars on one of my milkweed plants. Colin and I went to look at them to see what kind they were. I thought they were probably monarchs because that’s why I planted the milkweed in the first place (it is the monarch host plant). Monarch butterflies only lay their eggs on milkweed because that is what the caterpillars eat. We looked on the Internet to confirm their identity and caught one for our butterfly habitat. Since we knew exactly what it would eat, caring for it was very easy. We gave it fresh leaves for two days and Tuesday night, it crawled to the top of the enclosure and stayed there. Then, it started to let go very, very slowly with its front feet so that eventually it was left hanging in the shape of a “J,” upside down, clinging for dear life with its very back feet. I just knew that it would be a chrysalis when we got up Wednesday morning, but it wasn’t. I looked at it several times while I was working in the kitchen. One time I looked at it and it was still a “J” and less than five minutes later, I looked and it was a bright jade green chrysalis….beautiful!

We had ordered caterpillars online before and watched them develop into butterflies. Until that time, I had no idea how they actually did that (not that I’m perfectly clear on it now). They molt (shed the exoskeleton) and underneath is the chrysalis. When I was in school and up to the time we observed our first caterpillars turn into chrysalids, I thought butterfly caterpillars would spin cocoons around themselves. It has really been an eye-opening experience homeschooling and actually paying close attention to nature.

I have pictures of a caterpillar on the milkweed plant and one of the chrysalis. Notice the antennae on the front and the mock ones on the back to confuse predators. It is easy to mistake the back for the front. I couldn’t get a good picture of the caterpillar leading up to the chrysalis because of the netting on our habitat. I also can’t get a picture of the exoskeleton it shed to reveal the chrysalis. Hopefully within a few days, I will have pictures of the butterfly!

If you ever get a chance, it is a wonderful thing to watch a caterpillar’s transformation into a butterfly!!