Rewilding My Lot

If you want your garden to be visited by birds or butterflies, then you need to be willing to accept caterpillars, and they will voraciously eat holes in the leaves of their host plants.

Even before I’d had a chance to plant much of anything here, we were blessed with an abundance of volunteer sunflowers. (See earlier post: Sunflowers)

There were several visitors to the sunflower plants, including Bordered Patch butterflies.

Soon after that there was a glut of Bordered Patch caterpillars, which dutifully chomped their way through the sunflower leaves.

And then birds came to eat the caterpillars, or carry them to their young. The ones I saw most often were Mockingbirds.

Some of the caterpillars managed to reach the point of building a chrysalis. Often to do that they will crawl to a different plant, and I happened to spot one on our Texas Mountain Laurel tree that was attached by its back end end and holding itself in a J shape.

When I came back a few hours later, there was a chrysalis in that location. The chrysalis seems smaller than the original caterpillar, but that is probably because the caterpillar skin is shed in the process. Unfortunately, then I went away for a few days and wasn’t able to track progress of the chrysalis — it was gone by the time I returned.