There is one thing that I am constantly reminded of, and that is that mother nature has a sense of humour. I am almost convinced that she indulged in her own "recreational plants" *ahem* once in a while when she was doing the inventing. The Tussock Moth caterpillar is a case in point, I can just imagine Mother Nature with her various helpers (are they elves, or dwarfs or fairies I don't know) after having imbibed some substance or another saying "ha ha ha, yeah give it two horns up front, but you know give it another one on its butt!, and make it really fuzzy, with some blobs on its back ha ha" I can then imagine her waking up the next morning with a serious headache saying "what the hell was I thinking?"

[[http://www.richard-seaman.com/Arthropods/Usa/Caterpillars/NorthernIllinois/WhiteMarkedTussockMothCaterpillar.jpg]]

The same premise applies when it comes to the Golden Tortoise Beetle. The Golden Tortoise Beetle eats morning glory plants, and their relatives (which is why my sweet potato vines look like lace doilies right now), so one would assume that they would be green, or brown, or even in a moment of madness be pink to match the flowers. But no, mother nature decided to make the little dudes Gold, and I don't mean gold as in a nice yellow, or some such thing, I mean that they actually look like tiny blobs of liquid, molten gold. It baffles me, it really does, why would they be gold? And if you don't believe me here is a photo I took today.


Now granted they spend their entire life on the underside of leaves so they don't get seen but why make them gold? Like I said, sense of humour. There are other colours of tortoise beetles, one for instance looks like a ladybug with a see-through crash helmet on, as in here



There are also black ones with the same see through crash helmet on. Mother nature has a sense of humour, I just hope we all get the joke.

This morning I slept late, not like me, but for a moment it was just a joy to wake up, look at the clock, and then turn over and go back to sleep. When I finally roused myself I let the dogs out and we all went out to the patio. Through my sleepy eyes I noticed a flash of black on the fennel, a sure sign that a butterfly had hatched that morning (the second one to hatch to my knowledge and the second one I have missed this year), still busily pumping blood from her abdomen into her wings she was hanging on to the fennel for dear life.



I watched her for a while, as she caught her breath, and just gloried in the fact that she had wings, and I smiled, until off she went, on her new wings, and took a little bit of me with her. I just so love being me sometimes, in the moments when the things I have done result in something like this, in a moment, when a butterfly comes into being because of something that I did, when a butterfly flies off with my stamp on it, goes into the world and for whatever brief moment beautifies it, I just so love being me. I can't change the world, but I can change it one butterfly at a time. Damn, it is good to be me.

It is a very exciting time in the garden for me, particularly on the caterpillar front. The two earliest black swallowtail caterpillars on my bronze fennel heard their internal alarm clock go off and realized that it was time for them to become butterflies. As they do (under my watchful eye) they set out to find a sturdy stalk on which to attach themselves to become a chrysalis. This is a painstaking process, involving alot of forehead rubbing and cheek rubbing and sniffing, all of which, I am assuming is attempting to discover if the stalk which they are scoping out is going to be long lasting and strong enough to support their purposes. I watched one last weekend, (thankfully for me he chose the butterfly weed stalk that was fairly accessible, sometimes they choose an almost impossible location). So I sat on my patio chair and watched, sweat pouring down my face, but too fascinated to go indoors. After said stalk had been thoroughly inspected and found suitable for the purpose the cheek rubbing began, this is a process (it is hard to see with the naked eye) whereupon the silk required to anchor the chrysalis to the stalk is laid down.



and of course the entire stalk has to be anchored with silk, seeing as it has to support the weight of a fat butterfly at some point.



As I was watching this I noticed quite a commotion on the bronze fennel, it would appear that little dude was really annoying big dude as little dude insisted on following big dude around (I suppose it is akin to a five year old following his 15 year old brother around saying "watcha doin?")



Big dude twitched a few times to let little dude know he was not impressed but when little dude didn't get the message what followed was the funniest thing I have seen in my garden for a long time. A caterpillar beating up on another caterpillar. He literally turned around and started smacking little dude with his head.



Eventually little dude got the message and went to another piece of the fennel. Interestingly enough, the little dudes you see in the photograph are now, just one short week later, the size of the big dude you see in the photograph, it really is incredible how fast they grow.

Eventually the caterpillar I was monitoring turned for the last time and sat motionless. I knew that by the following morning he would be attached to the stalk by just his head and his rear end with his center section arched out to form a "c" and after he had shed his skin he would be a chrysalis, which he is as we speak. I will monitor them now of course, hoping to catch one hatching. Three others have since set out on their journey from the fennel to the surrounding plants, one other is on another butterfly weed stalk and two are on grass stalks. Luckily all are in places that I can monitor them. In a worrying development many, many more eggs have been laid on the fennel, and I am not sure it will be sufficient to sustain the soon-to-be caterpillars, looks like an emergency run to pender pines is in order.

So as I said last year, and as Hermione said in "Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban" so now we wait.