Retired schoolteacher Tachi Dellinger pointed inside a mesh box, where three green chrysalises hung.
“This one is starting to change color,” Dellinger said. “It will turn jet black ... when it's ready to come out and emerge.”
This is the first year that monarchs have graced her garden in Charlotte. For Dellinger, this was a big deal — she’s been a fan of the insects ever since she learned about their Odyssean migration route back in 1976.
“The children that I was teaching, we would go out on the playground and count monarchs flying over for about 30 minutes, and then graph that inside to see what the numbers were,” Dellinger said.
Unfortunately, those numbers are in decline. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that 80% of the eastern migratory population has died off since the 1980s. Dellinger rescued these caterpillars from a hornet in her front yard.
“After I got rid of the hornet, I decided we had to save these caterpillars,” Dellinger said. She scooped up four caterpillars and put them on a milkweed plant inside a white, mesh habitat.
Monarch caterpillars are about two inches long with black, yellow and white stripes and four tentacles, or filaments, that jut out like spindly legs from their head and back. They resemble antennae but technically are not; the insect's actual antennae are much smaller and located near its mouth.
Once they’d finished their nibbling, they shed their exoskeletons and formed chrysalises. On Monday, Dellinger had three chrysalises hanging; one of the butterflies emerged over the weekend.
The caterpillars that made these chrysalises are the great-great-grandchildren of the monarch butterflies that migrated to Mexico last year. When they emerge, the butterflies will make the same pilgrimage as their ancestors.
“When you're a conservationist, environmentalist, you can't do everything, but you can do something,” Dellinger said. “You can plant milkweed for the monarchs.”
Common milkweed, or Asclepias syriaca, is a wildflower native to North Carolina. Its thick green leaves spiral around a sturdy stalk, growing up to five feet tall. In the summer, clusters of flowers erupt from the stem in dazzling balls of pink and white — not unlike a firework display. The flower’s name originates from the milky liquid that flows from the leaves and stems when broken.
Monarchs only lay their eggs on milkweed. Without this plant, they can’t reproduce.
“If you don’t have milkweed, no monarchs,” Dellinger said.
