Mark Hughes, owner of Regalia Handmade Clothing on White St., has long been a butterfly lover.
“Butterflies are one of my favorite animals,” Mark said. “They have always been a totem animal for me. That’s why I wear butterfly wings in parades.”
A year ago, his friend Gwen Bennett called him concerned she had too many monarch caterpillars and not enough food for them. Hughes became a foster parent and put some of Gwen’s extra caterpillars on a butterfly weed at his house and let nature take its course.
This year Gwen once again called because she had too many caterpillars at her house and at the library garden where milkweed has been planted. She asked Mark if he had any milkweed planted, specifically requesting the native swamp milkweed (pink) because she said the caterpillars weren’t eating other kinds of butterfly plants like Asclepius tuberosa (orange).
Mark looked at his swamp milkweed that had grown very tall, and found out he had the same problem as Gwen: too many caterpillars and not enough milkweed that monarch caterpillars require.
He and his partner, Steve Beacham, went to Bear Creek Nursery and bought six more tall, mature milkweed plants. They took one to the library for the caterpillars there, and another to the garden of another friend, Jane Tucker.
“They stripped her plant,” Mark said. “We had to take her a second one and they stripped that one, as well. Then we put the remainder of the milkweed on our deck.”
Caterpillars can have a lot of predators, so Mark was concerned when the caterpillars at the library and Jane’s garden disappeared. There was no nearby evidence that the caterpillars had turned into the chrysalis form that precedes the emerging butterfly.
Gwen suggested Mark create a butterfly hatchery to protect the butterflies, and Mark and Steve bought an inexpensive mesh laundry hamper, enclosed one end with mesh and a zipper for access, and put caterpillars inside with some milkweed leaves clipped to some branches. When it looked like there wasn’t enough food, he started feeding them shaved cucumber, spaghetti squash and butternut squash.
“Then I ordered three cages specifically for butterflies and we set those up,” Mark said. “We had twenty-eight chrysalides. We moved them back and forth, doing a lot of tending. By the time we went on vacation, the hardest part was over. Our friends taking care of the house watched them hatch out and let them go every day.”
In early October they released the last butterfly. The final tally was about 24 out of the 28, a pretty good result.
“It has been a crash course on butterfly growing,” said Mark, whose Facebook posts on the topic generated a lot of interest. “I really kind of agonized about putting them in the pens, but their chances are better in there. The ones from the library and Jane Tucker’s house just disappeared, and Faith Shah said the same thing happened to the caterpillars on her milkweeds.”
Mark said while rearing the butterflies was time consuming, it wasn’t expensive.
“It certainly made me feel I had made up for the times I hit them on the highway,” Mark said. “But more than that, I got to be just in awe of how many miracles are involved with one small life from the beginning to the end because there is the miracle of the transformation in the chrysalis, the miracle of how they know where to go to lay eggs, the miracle of flying from here to Mexico, and the miracle that they find milkweed in the first place. It has been so fascinating. What also amazes me about it is that it was really so easy in the scheme of things. It’s a hobby almost anyone could take up if they’re willing to be gentle. There is nothing you have to do that is too difficult or expensive.”
Mark also has planted a favorite food source of the monarchs and other butterflies: zinnias. He was delighted recently to find about 30 monarchs flitting around the zinnias.
“They might be the ones that hatched ten feet away from where I lost track of them,” Mark said. “Gwen found a hatched chrysalis about ten feet away from the milkweed. Maybe the ones that disappeared from plants are okay just because we are seeing so many. Anyhow, I think now they are getting all the sugars they can from the flowers in bloom. Within the next few days, they will all start heading for Texas. I think it’s just nice to have the verification than maybe more of them made it than would have it we hadn’t helped.”
Next year Mark thinks it would be cool to take the caged chrysalides to the library or schools to let kids watch them hatch.