They're Here!

It’s that time of the year again where The Orchid Conservatory and the Garden becomes home to some very special insects, butterflies! Some of the species we have this year include monarchs, painted ladies, swallowtails and mourning cloaks. The most fascinating part is some of the butterflies we receive come to us in the form of a chrysalis.

The beautiful butterfly you normally see goes through a long process before it becomes what you see. Everyone knows the short version of metamorphosis: caterpillar-larvae-butterfly. In our regular gardens, you may come across caterpillars. The Garden has some naturally so we don’t order any of those. For our Something’s A-Flutter exhibit, we receive butterflies both in the pupae stage (a chrysalis), and adulthood (butterfly).

Our first order of chrysalides came in on Tuesday. Enthusiastic volunteers and staff were armed with cotton balls and pins ready to prepare these little gems for display. We receive the chrysalides from butterfly farms via UPS or FedEx. When we get the package, the chrysalides are packed in foam cases, with individual slots. We’re expecting to receive several hundred chrysalides a week! After gently removing the chrysalides, we create artificial silk by taking a tiny amount of glue and gathering a small piece of cotton ball so it sticks to the chrysalis. Usually in nature, this silk would allow the chrysalis to hang from a twig, but we just take pins and hang the chrysalis up by the cotton.

Chrysalides are different depending on the species of the butterfly. The most impressive chrysalis is the monarch. With its seafoam green case and sparkling gold accents, the monarch chrysalis looks like the focal point of a fine piece of jewelry. Other chrysalides look more natural like a leaf such as the painted ladies. The reason why the monarch chrysalis is so pretty is because the case is a warning signs for predators to stay away. The monarch doesn’t have a very a nice taste. However, the painted ladies taste very good to predators so they require more camouflage to blend in with the natural environment. All of our chrysalides are safe from predators because we display them in a case for you to see part of the butterfly life cycle.

Then we just wait. The chrysalis will turn black and in some cases then clear. The monarch will turn clear and you can see the bright orange colors. When the butterfly hatches, it releases its extra blood it no longer needs (miconium) so don’t be surprised if you see red on the bottom of the display case. Then the emerging butterfly grabs onto the chrysalis while it pumps blood from its abdomen into its wings. The wings are smaller and look like folded blankets when first hatching. After pumping its wings, the butterfly is ready to feed and fly around. The hatching process is different depending on the species. We had some butterflies hatching on Wednesday, only a day later! Painted ladies are quick to hatch, while the swallowtails take a little longer. If you’re lucky, you can see the process yourself in our Conservatory. Be sure to check out both our friends under metamorphosis and our already fluttering friends!

Food Fight

They say that if you truly love something you have to let it go. I'm not quite sure who "they" are, but "they" are also champions of other depressing adages such as "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch", "anything that can go wrong will", and my personal favorite, "beggars can't be choosers". Well kids, in this situation life truly imitates art. Perhaps I should tell my story...

The Orchid Conservatory features a lovely collection of tropical fruit trees and shrubs. Every effort is made to coax these wonders into producing fruit, which not only do our visitors enjoy viewing, but we, the staff, enjoy consuming. The fruits of our labor if you will. Some of these plants are bounteous, easy to grow and productive to the point of nuisance. The bananas would fall under this category, each season bringing us up to 100 pounds of fruit that ripen simultaneously and make us all sick of banana bread and pudding. Others are finicky plants and have very specific cultural requirements that must be met in order for fruit production to occur. In this latter category are the citrus, the chocolate tree (evil evil thing!) and the subject of our saga, the pineapple.

After a long years wait, defying rot, pests, and a freak boiler failure that plunged the conservatory into a night of forty degree temperatures, our pineapple plant sent up a lovely pink flower spike! Slowly but surely each flower dropped off, revealing a spiky green pineapple segment. A pineapple is actually a compound fruit- one that is composed of many small fruits fused together. Over a period of weeks the fruit grew to a decent size of about 8 inches long. As hot summer days ensued the ripening process began, changing the pineapple from a rock hard, dull green rock to a fragrant golden fruit. The scent of it hung in the air, enticing us with the promise of a treat no grocery store could deliver.

As luck would have it, two of my esteemed staff celebrate birthdays within the same week of August. A wonderful plan formed in my mind. What better birthday cake for the conservatory staff than a scrumptious pineapple upside-down cake, made with the luxurious fruit of our very own pineapple crop? I stroked the pineapple gently that Friday before leaving for the weekend. "Monday my dear, you become a culinary masterpiece." Over the weekend I gathered the other ingredients for my super-special-tropical-birthday-surprise-cake and planned our party for the next Tuesday.

Sadly, fate intervened over the weekend. Upon arriving at work Monday morning I received the report- the pineapple had vanished. A year's worth of love and care disappeared, replaced by a torn and ugly stub. All I can hope is that who ever took it enjoyed it, that it wasn't just tossed in the back of a fridge to turn to mush or thrown off a bridge to see how big of a splash it made. If the culprit is out there reading this enjoy your pineapple, you will never have another like it and I imagine the wheel of karma will turn your way eventually.

I guess we'll have banana bread instead.

Here's How We Do It

This is the second year of the Bluebird Trail here at the garden and we’ve been in the saddle, so to speak, since the beginning of the project. We aren’t sure how we were selected to monitor the birds’ activities, but it must have been because we talk “birds” a lot. At any rate, it just sort of evolved and we consider it a privilege, as well as a pleasure, to keep tabs on the Eastern Bluebirds which we do one morning each week from mid-March until mid-September.

So what exactly do we do? We start out by taking a golf cart to the beginning of the trail and then we start knocking on doors (nestboxes). Knocking is supposed to alert the female that we’re going to open the box. If there’s one in there, she usually flies out but we’ve found that sometimes she stays on the nest and gives us “the eye.” In fact, in several cases the bird has been so obstinate that we’ve returned to the particular box later, after she has left, to check on what was happening in there.

We check each box for evidence of nesting such as a partial nest, a complete nest, or no interest in that box at all. If it’s a complete nest, we carefully peek in to see if there are eggs and if so, how many are in the nestcup that week. If there are chicks in the nest, we count heads (often wide-open mouths) and compare them to the number of eggs we had recorded. If the chicks have been in the nest into the second week, we know it’s about time for them to fledge so we’re very careful when opening the box and peeking in. We don’t want them to fly before their time.

All of this information is recorded on a checksheet which we developed. We have a sheet for each box, and the sheet shows four (sometimes five) weeks of data that we’ve collected for the month. Often we have to refer to the prior month’s sheet to see what had been happening in a box. There’s a section for additional comments and our notes in this column often are more helpful than just the numbers.

So we make the rounds checking boxes and doing some other birding along the way. We keep lists of all the birds we see during the couple of hours we spend on the trail. That information will be useful someday, also, and folks always want to know what we’ve seen. Ours is a great assignment!