I'm expecting -- Monarch Watch

I've taken a special interest in trying to help along three monarch caterpillars who were laid too late this Fall to properly survive our short warm season. I gave one, the original only one, to a friend who has large native milkweed plants in her yard. Later I discovered two more caterpillars that somehow survived some seasonal morning frosts. Since these last two were doing so well, I just left them well enough alone.

I'm new to what it takes for them to survive to adulthood, so after a recent rain I went out to the river to see how they were doing. Not well. My friend had said hers disappeared, so that was one down. Of my remaining two, the larger had also disappeared, probably looking for an impossible warm place to form into a pupa (chrysalis) and the other had spun a silk web with which to suspend himself under a leaf. He/she was comatose and ice cold to the touch, like an ice cube compared to the outside air.

All were destined to die. I decided to step in, taking him and some plant leaves to my warm vehicle and giving him some warm air from the cabin vents. Like being shocked by electricity, he snapped out of his fetal position a few minutes later.

To make a long story short, I made him a little enclosed but vented incubator environment with sticks and fresh milkweed leaves, which he greedily ate for about a week, then stopped eating. Two days ago I found him scampering around wildly in search of something (hint), the following morning, I found him hung upside down to a stick. And on perfect que, when I arrived home yesterday evening he had begun...

In his 75° temperature controlled incubator, we should have a monarch butterfly ready for release, beating the 1 in 100 odds, here on Halloween. He'll be released into the relatively warm open California wilderness shortly thereafter, hopefully joining others overwintering along the coast or in Mexico.

Last year I had two caterpillars in our back yard that I believed also perished due to their being hatched late. Apparently temperature is critical to their pupa development.