When Suzi, my Boxer-Golden Retriever mix, was a puppy, I nicknamed her Solar Cell because she loved to play for a while, then stretch out full length and soak up the sun’s rays in the back yard.
One day a yellow butterfly came fluttering by. Suzi jumped up from her sun bath. She was startled, curious. The butterfly swooped towards her. Suzi leaped up, trying to catch it, but the butterfly rose up just out of reach, and then swooped down again. The two of them started a dance – swooping and leaping. What fun to watch!
Sitting on the porch, laughing, I wondered, not for the first time- where is the video when you need it?
I wondered too, what was it like, long ago, for the first person to ever see a butterfly? Faced with something totally unknown, something with wings and beautiful colors, well, did they immediately run after it, trying to capture the winged beauty with their hands? Did they want to possess it?
Or were they overcome with awe at this alien thing, this miniature burst of color fluttering on the wind. Did they just stop in their tracks, stand stock still, then, impulsively, smile, laugh and start clapping all at the same time, overwhelmed at the sheer wonder of a butterfly? We’ll never know. It was so long ago.
Butterflies are live performance art – canvases ripped off of the Creator’s easels and set free to dance in the breeze. They follow an erratic flight pattern only they can read as they search for just the right lunch and the perfect host plant for their eggs.
WARNING: If pesticides are your thing, and you can’t stand the sight of a caterpillar, forget having butterflies in your yard. They are like the canary in the coal mine, so sensitive to the environment. Spray Dr. Death (any brand of pesticide) and it kills butterflies, just like fumes in a mine will kill canaries.
But, you say, butterflies are good while caterpillars are bad? Oops, maybe you were snoozing in the sixth grade when the science teacher told you about metamorphosis, meaning change of form.
Butterflies are multi taskers. The four stages of a butterfly’s life, each with its own look, are an egg, larva or caterpillar, pupa or chrysalis and then winged adult in all its finery.
Caterpillars eat a lot. The Monarch butterfly, in its caterpillar stage, can strip a milkweed to the bare stem. No problem, milkweed is poisonous to anything else. That’s one way to guarantee your food source!
Adult butterflies fly around looking for lunch. One day, on a bright red Penta growing in the back yard, I counted nine different species of butterflies. Wow. How special is that?
A friend gave me a butterfly house – a pretty thing painted with flowers and narrow slit openings for the butterflies. It stunned me. Why had I never thought to wonder where butterflies go at night? Turns out they cling to the undersides of leaves or tuck into tree crevices.
Marc Minno, author of “Florida Butterfly Gardening” (University of Florida Press, 1999) with his wife Maria Minno, says he’s never seen a butterfly use a butterfly house but they are pretty and you never know. It can’t hurt to try one or two.
At the age of 11, Suzi snoozes more these days and plays less, but I still remember her as a puppy, discovering something new and wonderful – the day she danced with a butterfly.
©2005 Lucy Tobias.