My experience seems to be the exception rather than the rule this year. Friends have only just begun reporting caterpillars in their milkweed. There’s speculation that smoke from the Canadian wildfires may have diverted or slowed their migration. If this is the case, the first monarch in my garden might have arrived before the smoke affected air quality.

This year’s Monarch journey truly began when I returned home from Pennsylvania on July 4th to find my milkweed patch teeming with nearly full-grown Monarch caterpillars. Each time I walked by, I’d spot another–it was a bit wild.

I began collecting milkweed stalks and placed them in the little Monarch nursery Paul made for me a few years ago. Before long, I had 60 Monarch chrysalises. You can see a video of the process of the caterpillar morphing into a chrysalis here. 

This little nursery was not designed to accommodate so many caterpillars and chrysalises, so I carefully relocated many of the chrysalises to a wire rack on our screened porch for protection. To do this, I tied some dental floss around the remaining silk and secured it to the rack.

About two weeks after the first chrysalis appeared, some of them turned transparent, revealing the monarch butterflies ready to emerge.

One monarch emerged just moments before I snapped this photo.

Here are three butterflies that emerged yesterday.

And here are two that hatched in the nursery.

I moved the butterflies that emerged on the porch to a vase of sunflowers. They hang upside down for an hour or two as their wings expand before they test them and take their first flight. Eventually, their first flight took them to the screens where I captured them and moved them outside to be free.  

It was fun to spend my Sunday in the quiet of the porch, observing them up close. The one in the foreground is a male; you can tell by the little oval spot on its dorsal wing.

Watching the butterflies I helped raise flit about the garden brings me such heartfelt joy. 

The video below (at 8x speed) is monarch #34 of 60 emerging this morning–so there are more updates to come with this story! Note, if you’re reading this post in your email, click the “Continue Reading” link below to view the full post online. 

More monarch posts:

• October 2021: Farewell to Summer Joys
• August 2021: It’s a Girl
• May 2020: An Official Monarch Nursery
• October 2020: October Monarch
• July 2019: Milkweed, Monarchs, and Missteps
• August 2019: Monarch Babies
• August 2017: Summer of the Monarch
• August 2017: Monarch Caterpillar Becomes a Chrysalis
• July 2017: Caterpillar Rescue