They’re beginning to metamorphose.
Mary also took a photo of the same chrysalis, with her iPhone. Hers came out a little nicer, with more context, and shadows that weren’t as dramatic.
In my defense, it was very low to the ground beneath a stony overhang, and it was killing my knees to try to get that low.
Why not for long?
Just their lifespans or something else?
They emerge, and fly away.
A monarch chrysalis is a beautiful thing.
I have not had any monarch caterpillars to raise this years, though I do have three types of milkweeds to provide them food. Earwigs(?) got all the eggs before they hatched sadly.
I do have a swallowtail caterpillar of some kind in the rue plants. Apparently they overwinter as cocoons.
It’s odd, but our yard here in SE Connecticut is full of both swamp milkweed and butterfly weed, and we see dozens of Monarchs flying about to all the pollinator plantings we have. And yet I look and look and have yet to find a chrysalis. Same thing for the Eastern Swallowtail which has at least once made a chrysalis on our bronze fennel. Haven’t seen one in years, though the butterflies are in the yard. When we first moved in here, the Monarchs were like a blizzard, but as our neighbors spray more often for ticks and mosquitoes and against weeds, the numbers and types of moths and butterflies have diminished. Also frogs and toads.