🌿 Shh… We’re on a butterfly stakeout! Come along as we explore our garden and try to catch the elusive Tiger Swallowtail in action. We’ll even show you some sneaky caterpillar tricks! Get ready for a fun and fascinating adventure!
This video is full of amazing things that you won’t want to miss. Get ready to be amazed! Click the video below.
Video Transcript:
Hello butterfly lovers! We are in our butterfly garden here. One very important part of any garden are host plants. We have planted quite a few in ours and one of them is the Sweetbay Magnolia tree which we planted to attract the Tiger Swallowtail butterfly. We have a couple Sweetbay Magnolia and a couple of Tulip Popular. They are all host plants for the Tiger Swallowtail. The male is yellow with black stripes, the female is mostly black with some blue, so they are very different looking.
We were able to see a female flying around this Sweeetbay Magnolia one day and hoping she was laying eggs. This is this little tree right here. Not a big tree, it’s one of our newer ones. And sure enough we did find eggs and then about 10 days to 2 weeks later we started to seeing evidence on this tree. Actually, the evidence was on the ground.
The Tiger Swallowtail while eating the leaves, they also clip off some leaves as the caterpillar did here. And drop to the ground. That’s kind of a giveaway that someone is actually in this tree. So, we looked around and they aren’t always easy to see because everything is green, including the caterpillar. So, if you know the caterpillar is green then you know you are looking for something very similar. In fact, you see right here, here is the caterpillar. Right here on this leaf.
Closer look, there it is. A beautiful caterpillar. Two false eyes that you at the top there. They aren’t real. They make them look larger. Something the predator wants to leave alone. Some birds might think it’s a snake; that’s want it uses for its defense.
Also, what it does sends out this silk, as you see on this leaf, this white stringing material is sticky. That’s what the caterpillar hangs on the leaf with. The caterpillar will eat different leaves. It’s resting right now. It will during the day eat different leaves [2:48 caterpillar poops] and then basically finds a resting spot. Oh there, you just got a good shot of it pooping. We call that caterpillar frass. It just let go.
Uhm, so this caterpillar will be on this tree for about two weeks. So, 10-14 days, something like that. Once it has it fill, eats all of the food it needs it will leave the tree and go find a place, a nice secure place to form a chrysalis. Where it will in another 10 days or so become a butterfly. So that’s the life cycle that we like to have in our garden.
See the whole life cycle. The adults, the eggs, the caterpillars, and its great entertainment. So hopefully you have some of this in your yard and find them on your host plants, so happy hunting.
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