The Very, Very Hungry Caterpillar

A few days ago we were playing outside when the kids discovered a green, black and yellow caterpillar munching away on my parsley. These little guys show up every year and devour the herb down to its stalks, but this year I figured that if they were going to snack on my garden, by golly, they were going to give us the benefit of watching them turn into butterflies. So before Captain D could gleefully stomp on it, I scooped up the caterpillar and the parsley and dumped them into a small glass insect jar.

There, we watched him munch away on parsley for the next few days. And let me just say, that guy could eat! We ran out of our homegrown parsley so I had to dig into the stash in the fridge. He just kept on munching... until one day he climbed up on a twig and turned into a chrysalis. Sweet.

After a little research we discovered that this was a black swallowtail caterpillar, so when he grows up he'll look sort of like a dead butterfly we found this spring. Notice the "swallow" tail, how it's forked like the tail of a swallowtail. Pretty cool.

How I love watching nature at work!

What we're reading:
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle 
From Caterpillar to Butterfly by Deborah Heiligman (Let's Read and Find Out Science 
Butterfly Eggs by Helen Frost  
Good Night, Sweet Butterflies by Dawn Bentley