Lending a hand...

I released 8 monarchs today - it was a busy day in the "birthing chamber!"  My enclosures have zippered sides so when the monarchs are flight-ready, I can just unzip the side and they can fly out when they are ready.  This one (#21) flew out and landed on my left thumb just long enough for me to snap a few pics with my right hand before she gave me a little nod and soared high up into the trees.  Magical!  

I was also lucky enough to have the camera set up when she eclosed at about 10 this morning and got a pretty good 90-second video of her arrival into the world.  I've posted it HERE on Flickr - worth a look if you've never seen a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis before.  I took another shot of her in the enclosure showing off her glorious wings.

I started this "monarch season" with a goal to raise and release 25 monarchs.  As of today, I'm at 27 successful releases; and there are at least 5 more queued up to emerge tomorrow.  Assuming that the 15 little cats I brought in from the garden 2 days ago all make it, I may well come close to 50 releases this year.  That's pretty cool!  And what an incredibly interesting and rewarding experience to watch them go from egg to butterfly.  In the wild, somewhere between 5% and 10% of eggs ever make it to butterflies, so I'd like to think I've helped in some small way to ensure that we continue to see these gorgeous creatures in our country.

Meanwhile, I saw one adult male hummer this morning, briefly.  My guess is that he roosted here last night and then nectared up before hitting the skies.  Wonder if he'll be the last adult male of the season?  Still have a half dozen hummers roaring around the garden - some may be "ours" from this summer and I'm sure some are migrants.  This one had a different feather pattern on his throat than I've seen on the regulars.  

And, under the category of "weird", I watched two female Downy woodpeckers investigating one of my nest boxes..  They would never use this box for nesting, so I can only assume that they were looking at it as a possible roosting sight for cold winter nights.  Very odd.  

Hubs and his partners are off to Baltimore for a meeting with a potential client tomorrow, so I'm on my own for the evening.  Dinner might be a smoothie and some popcorn!  

Thanks for stopping by, and thank you for sending yesterday's Full Frontal Hummie to the front page of Pops.  

Cheers,
Debbi