January 6, 2011- Butterflies and Bird Baths

     It’s butterfly season in the islands. Over the weekend, on our “Sunday Drives” around Roi-Namur, not only did we find the chickens and roosters, but we also saw tons and tons of butterflies! I love this time of year. They virtually surrounded the cart as we meandered through the jungle, fluttering about and flirting, males showing off their beautiful black wings with yellow and purple spots while chasing the neutral colored girls with brown markings.  My son loves to collect caterpillars around this time and put them in his glass aquarium out back at his dad’s house to watch them chrysalis and turn into butterflies.  Being novices at raising butterflies, sometimes they surprise us and form a cocoon and become moths.  A friend of ours who used to dabble in “butterfly farming” found my oldest a caterpillar last year that she said was fat and ready to turn, so he took him home and within a day or two his head popped off (which shocked and startled me), and he hibernated into his chrysalis, then within short order, he was ready to fly off into a brand new world.   I was not aware of the difference between a cocoon and chrysalis until our encounter with this very knowledgeable friend. And since I am not always so good at explaining the natural order of things in my own words, I have borrowed these from Answers.com: “A cocoon is a covering made of silk that encloses a pupa, and a chrysalis is the pupa of a butterfly. The chrysalis is covered in a hard, chitnous shell. Note the difference: A cocoon is a covering of a pupa, and a chrysalis is a particular kind of pupa, usually with no enclosing cocoon. Inside a cocoon, you will often find a pupa of a moth or other insect with an inner chitinous shell, but it is not called a chrysalis unless it is the pupa of a butterfly. The pupae of some insects have visible external body structures, such as wings and legs, as they develop, while others (such as moths) have a smooth outer shell that encloses the developing structures.” (In case you are wondering like I was, chitnous is actually a word, and it is an adjective from the root word of chitin, which means, ‘A tough semitransparent substance forming the principal component of arthropod exoskeletons and the cell walls of certain fungi,’ according to the American Heritage College Dictionary.) At any rate, it’s all very fascinating, but unfortunately, we do not have the same abundance of butterflies and moths here on Kwajalein, so I was excited today to venture under a tree across the street from my house and have one of the island’s magnificent black male butterflies find its way right in front of my path.  It’s these little things that make my day, that bring a smile to my face, just like the tiny bird I saw bathing in a puddle right off the side of the road on my way to the post office.  Butterflies and bird baths, two of the simple pleasures of daily life on the atoll!