We had a life lesson about nature over the weekend...We had been keeping a close eye on our little caterpillar and he was getting bigger and bigger and brighter and brighter. We enjoyed watching him chomping away on our parsley plant.
I started to get a little afraid about a bird coming by and snatching him up so we placed a bit of screen over him to help protect him. The screen is actually this beach bag that I made over the summer and just turned it upside down.
We were preparing ourselves for the possibility of not seeing a butterfly for quite some time seeing that it has been getting colder and were expecting, after the cocoon was built, for the caterpillar/butterfly to enter a diapause stage and hopefully emerge in the spring. But, over the weekend as we went to gently pick the screen off of the parsley plant we found the caterpillar on the screen stuck. It looked like he was trying to begin his cocoon but then got too cold.
We still keep checking on him, but I am sorry to say that it seems like this little "pet" project is over. Maybe we will try again next year. Maybe we should bring the caterpillar inside next time, maybe I shouldn't have put the screen over top of it and it would have found a somewhat warmer place to go. Who knows really. Maybe we should have just stuck to observing and let nature run it's course, b/c that's just the way it goes sometimes...
