Let's Get Small

        Big things do come in small packages, and this post also will be a small package. Remember in our last post we had two shots of the mother Monarch laying eggs, one on the leaf of a smaller milkweed, and one apparently somewhere up within the milkweed flower? Well, naturally we wanted to see what we could find in those spots. And lo and behold, under that exact leaf, a Monarch egg. It's the tiny white dot. 

     Up in the budding flower, a slightly different, more menacing story.We couldn't locate the eggs just yet. There was instead one of the family of milkweed pests, the boringly-named yet bothersome and destructive milkweed bug, lurking up there. He was removed after being discovered up there.

      As Stephanie and I walked up the outside steps returning home last night, we noticed something odd on the parsley in the windowbox planter. We thought we had seen similar photos before, when researching black swallowtail caterpillars. And indeed, there munching away on the curly-leaf,  was our very own Elvis. That's right.  Elvis Parsley, a second instar of the Black Swallowtail caterpillar. Actual size is three-quarters of an inch, tops. 

     We do have one new sighting to report. For this first time this season, we present the Red-Spotted Purple.