A Butterfly Story

Between good weather and quarantine, we've been getting very familiar with the garden. On Wednesday, we found a butterfly chrysalis on the wall. This immediately became the most dramatic feature of the garden, and so we gave much thought to it overnight... we were concerned it might be too exposed where it was: it wasn't camouflaged at all, so it could easily be napped by a bird looking for a tasty snack.

Therefore, on Thursday we followed online tutorials and prepared some damp paper towels in a mason jar. Using a bamboo skewer, we gently prised the chrysalis away from the wall then glued it to the skewer. We popped that in a mason jar and bingo: One homeschool science lesson.

I then suggested that the children go and hunt around the garden to see if they could find any more chrysalises. This seemed a suitable extension activity—most importantly—it would keep the children occupied for ten minutes or so.

One minute later, my son called: "I found one! No, two... four! Five! Six!"

Clearly, he was overdoing it. I called back: "I'm not falling for that on April Fool's Day."

"No, Mum! It's true! There's loads!"

Somehow, it wasn't an April Fool's. Underneath the ledge of the back wall, were twenty to thirty chrysalises.

New extension activity: naming them all. We got through about fifteen before they lost interest, but my son lovingly named our inside chrysalis: "Biff."

We did some online research: the internet wisdom was that chrysalises took a couple of weeks before the butterfly emerged, but our chrysalis looked like it was a cabbage white, and the guide I found to those said they took thirty days. We weren't sure how old our chrysalis was: we couldn't recall seeing it on the wall before Wednesday, but how often did we really look at that stretch of wall? We decided that we would give it a month to see if it would hatch (eclose to use the correct term). I suggested that if it hadn't hatched by May, we could dissect it, but that didn't go down well.

The next morning, I glanced into the jar and found an empty chrysalis. Further inspection revealed Biff clinging to the paper towel underneath.

What I think happened was that we found an overwintering chrysalis. Once we brought it inside where it was warm and bright for so long, the butterfly came out, thinking it was spring.

It's technically warm enough for a butterfly to survive, but we don't have any flowers in our garden yet and the whole area around here is generally flower deficient. To our horror, we realised that rather than saving Biff, we had instead given him a harder start in life.

Once more unto the internet! Furiously we googled and worked... well, my daughter and I did. My son was a little less struck by the urgency of the situation. My daughter made our own nectar (ten parts water to one part sugar) while I scouted around the house for spare bottle caps.

Then we reached over the garden wall to pilfer some flat stones from the farm access road (we'll return them once we're done!) and placed them in an old planter. Butterflies like flat exposed stones to bask on, and Biff would need to let the sun warm up the veins in his wings. We pushed the bottle caps into the soil and filled them up with sugar water.

Then, we constructed brightly coloured plastic flowers from LEGO and placed them over our sugar water reservoirs. Our butterfly nursery was complete! We placed it outside in the intermittent sunshine with Biff's jar pushed next to it. By this point, Biff had climbed back onto his bamboo skewer and we happily envisioned him climbing to the top of it and spying the flowers. Attracted by their bright colours, he would flutter into our nursery, drink the water and warm up on the stones. Then he would be ready to take flight into the world!

Ten minutes later, both the jar and the nursery were empty. Biff was gone.

Clearly, this whole butterfly-raising thing was not going as planned. We decided that we could try the nursery again once the others hatched, and we checked the other chrysalises several times throughout the day, but no further butterflies emerged.

Then, as the kids were playing in the garden this evening, my son spotted a butterfly in the grass. It was Biff!

He was clinging to a blade of grass, looking distinctly unfluttery and generally depressed. Gently pushing one finger underneath him (careful not to touch his wings), I was able to get him to scramble onto my hand, but then we couldn't persuade him off it and into our (now cold) nursery. We made a few attempts to get drops of sugar water on our fingers to feed him, but he seemed more interested in crawling over our warm hands. Inspecting him, we could see he was missing a leg, and we were concerned that he was making no attempt to open his wings. Were they damaged too?

Eventually, we brought him back inside. In the warmth of our living room, he perked right up, wandering about our hands and arms before doing a short flutter onto my daughter's colourful T-shirt. As I began preparing his jar again, improvising another LEGO feeder, Biff decided to take real flight and fluttered across our living room to mantlepiece. He rested there a moment before taking off again.

My daughter reached her hand up and he landed on her fingers. It was love! As of that moment, we had a pet butterfly.

I told her to cover her hands while we finished getting the jar ready. Then we coaxed him back onto his bamboo skewer—I don't know if this is scientifically accurate, but he seemed very ready to settle on his old chrysalis—and placed him back in the jar.

Biff is now in the shadows underneath the cabinet. But what comes next for our hero?

• Will Biff still be alive in the morning?
• Will we succeed in releasing him into the wild?
• Will my daughter succeed in her campaign to keep him for a few more days... or forever?

Tune in for the next exciting installment of Biff's Life!