Monarch Metamorphosis

I have been busy this summer studying and documenting monarch butterflies on my little monarch ranch off the back patio. It became an all-consuming pursuit as I strove to position myself in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to document the dual transformation of the monarch caterpillar: first, from caterpillar to jade-green chrysalis; and second, from chrysalis to butterfly.


It is not as easy as it sounds. Well, maybe it doesn't sound easy, but I can assure you it's tricky. The caterpillars and chrysalides have a sneaky way of doing their magic when nobody's watching: early in the morning, right at breakfast and bus time. They wait until you're completely distracted, trying to take care of your family and wham! they transform into something entirely else while you're buttering toast or answering the phone or signing a planner or digging up lunch money or racing to Athens to record a piece.


I decided that if I was ever going to catch the caterpillars at it, I'd have to have a whole lot of 'em, to increase the chances that one might decide to metamorphose when I was available to document it. And one...one of the 20 or so that I raised in a big glass vase on the kitchen table decided to cooperate. I set the camera up on a tripod against a neutral background and by gum I got it, the whole breathtaking thing, in over 600 exposures taken over about 10 hours.


National Public Radio solicited a submission to mark the first day of fall, so I wrote and recorded a piece about the whole experience. I sent hundreds of photos to their multimedia wizards and Mito Habe-Evans produced a wonderful video from them. I am grateful to her for all her work.

In the end, NPR decided not to air my commentary. But you can still find the video on the NPR website. It takes my breath away, just as sitting before a metamorphosing caterpillar always does.

Please go see how I spent my summer. I would be much obliged if you would comment and hit "Recommend." Since the commentary didn't air, sharing it on Facebook and Twitter and recommending it is one way to help it get seen by more eyes. For my part, I'll hope that it leads more people to my blog.

Thank you.

All photos in this post and on the NPR website are copyright2010 by Julie Zickefoose. Use without permission is expressly forbidden.

NPR Zick Alert! Purple Tomatoes!

After a long drought, I'll be on National Public Radio's All Things Considered this afternoon, sometime after 4 pm ET, exulting about some strange purple tomatoes that grew on my heirloom plants. As you know, I love messing about with plants and seeds, but then so do bumblebees. So I got a surprise when my seed-grown babies finally bore fruit.

Here are the tired old snap beans in the foreground. See those tiny white blossoms? They keep making dinner for me. So they get to live.

The purple tomatoes on the hoof.

Zinnias, a florist's strain called "Blue Point." Much the finest zinnias since "Yoga," also a Shepherd's Garden Seeds offering.

Man, it feels good to be back on the air. Listen in. Go to the story page on the NPR site, register if you haven't already (it takes a matter of seconds), and leave a comment. Hit Recommend at the top of the story page. Let 'em know you liked it (if you did). I don't want any more long NPR droughts. I need radio like I need Boston terriers, katydids and strange purple tomatoes.

Thanks for your support, as always and ever.

xo

jz

A Slow Surrender to Winter

Here's Liam's first published photo. Not bad for a ten-year-old, freezin' in his dinosaur jammies while he takes a picture of his mama.





photo by Liam Thompson. I'm about to toss them all on the compost pile. Cold front coming.



I don't know who listens to All Things Considered on Christmas Day. I don't. I'm too busy laying around and eating altogether too much and the wrong things and then playing Wii Fit and finding out I should be 14 pounds lighter and faster on my feet, or Japanese, whichever comes first. I'm betting on turning Japanese.



One of my new commentaries aired today. It's about hauling dying plants and praying mantises inside when I really shouldn't. You can listen to it on NPR's web site.



If the player doesn't work, hit "Download" and it'll give you an MP3 that does. That worked for me.

Or you can just read the transcript below.



But I kind of like the idea to talking to you over your 'puterbox. I miss you. I know, I'm taking a break. But I do.

A Slow Surrender to Winter

The sky couldn’t be heavier, lower, grayer, weepier. It’s 38, going for low in the 20’s. It’s winter, winter, winter. And I still have blooming flowers in baskets and containers on the front porch. Geraniums, lobelias, blue marguerite; plectranthus that when you brush its leaves, smells like a lime margarita.

Sure, they’re a bit brown, nipped around the edges, but the geraniums are blooming, shocking pink, red, magenta, like there’s no tomorrow. And for them, there isn’t. Unless…

I keep bringing them inside. I pile them up in the foyer and they weep leaves and dirt and petals that track all over the house. They block the closet doors. I can’t keep them inside, but I can’t leave them out to freeze. So I shuttle them in at night and out during the day, groaning with the effort. I’ve brought them this far. How can I sentence them to death?

blue margeurite on the compost pile, sighhh

But there’s a string of nights in the 20’s coming up, teens, even, and sooner or later I’ll have to say good-bye to summer for good. There’s something about looking out the kitchen window on blooming baskets of flowers that feels increasingly wrong. These bright jolts of color are somehow unseemly, when everything else is dead. And it's not just the plants that are dying.

Three times in my life, I’ve found a big praying mantis staggering weakly around my garden after the first light frost, and I’ve taken her—it’s invariably a female—inside. I set her up on a big potted plant where she sits regally all day, a weird alien pet, watching snowflakes drift down on the roses outside the window, where she once lived. I do this, knowing it’s wrong, but unable to leave her dying outside. I feed her crickets and mealworms, spray the leaves down with water, watch as she grabs and stabs, delicately dines; bends to drink droplets from the leaves, grooms her forearms and feet like a little otherworldly cat.

She turns her head to watch me when I walk into the room, holds out her spiked forelimbs to ask if she might ride on my arm to another plant, to sit in a spot of winter sun. This goes on until late January, February. I get entirely too attached. And then, like Goldie Hawn in “Death Becomes Her,” she begins to decay. First it’s an antenna, then a foot, then a lower leg, simply falling off. And then she loses her balance and falls, and busts off a forearm. And I see why mantids are meant to die with the first hard frost, and it’s brought home to me why I should never have brought her inside.

So it goes with the geraniums. I have to let them die. Tomorrow. Or maybe this weekend, with a light snowfall for their funeral shroud. Oh, the intractable human heart. It does this every year.

Hope you had a peaceful Christmas. We did.