How does a kid end up with a beautiful monarch butterfly on her finger?
It helps to have a wildflower garden in the backyard, or to have scoped out a patch of milkweed elsewhere in town. This backyard garden is planted with pickerelweed, Joe-Pye-Weed, boneset, and many other native wildflowers.
A glass fishbowl works well for housing monarch caterpillars. For documentary purposes, a camera, journal, and a cup of coffee for the grownup are handy. The bowl stayed on our kitchen window sill most of the time.
Monarch butterflies visit our garden every year, but in 2007 a female monarch came and left some eggs under the leaves of a swamp milkweed plant. The picture mostly shows a bunch of yellow aphids, which are tiny insects that drink the plant's juices. But at the top of the photo, you can see a tiny monarch caterpillar that has hatched from one of the eggs the monarch left.
My daughters brought this and other little caterpillars inside, and fed them a steady supply of milkweed leaves. The bedding--folded paper towels occasionally moistened--needed to be changed every couple days because of the mess the caterpillars make with all their frass. One time, the caterpillars ran out of food, and one of them crawled down the hall into the family room. It helps to cover the top of the bowl with netting so they don't wander.
When a caterpillar has grown to full size, it will climb one of the sticks, attach itself to the bottom side, and go into a "J" position.
It becomes very still, and overnight transforms itself into a beautiful green chrysalis with gold spots (on the right in the photo). It's really important that the caterpillar find a good spot to hang from, so that when the butterfly emerges, the wings can unfold and dry without bumping into anything.
After a week or so, if you've been keeping an eye on the green chrysalis, you will see it start to change color. Before long, it becomes completely clear, revealing the butterfly that has been developing inside.
There are two monarchs in this photo. The lower one is just starting to emerge from its chrysalis.
Continuing to crawl out of its shell,
the butterfly emerges, wings ready to unfurl.
The monarch continues to cling to the remains of the chrysalis while its wings unfold and dry. This is a very delicate process, and any disturbance at this point risks deforming the wings.
When the wings have unfolded and dried completely, the butterfly is ready to crawl up and out of the bowl, 
It's always a marvel to see beautiful plantings sustained year after year, particularly given the challenges posed by this summer's drought. 
A few years back, I spent an afternoon with some of Tim Anderson's science students collecting bags of Indian grass seed in a location where annual mowing allows prairie species to survive. This is the same Indian grass that flourishes in tallgrass prairies out west. In Princeton, it's most common along the petroleum pipeline right of way that cuts across the Princeton ridge, and in the meadows at Tusculum. Tim wanted to get some growing in the high school ecolab wetland on Walnut Street.
Another grass at the wetland, planted this spring and now flowering, is wild rice, which grows wild along the Stony Brook and at Rogers Refuge. Like corn, it's an annual that grows to remarkable size in one season. The wild rice, when combined with the cattails, Jerusalem artichoke, duck potato, elderberries and, for carnivores, the thriving crawdad population, is making the wetland look more edible all the time. This photo reproduces exactly what the flower head looks like when I have my glasses off.
Duck potato,a.k.a. arrowhead, is also blooming this time of year,
along with mistflower (Eupatorium coelestinum), which only grows to two feet high. It's ambitions are more horizontal than vertical, as it can get expansive and pushy if not surrounded by equally aggressive natives.
Cardinal flower (red) and boneset (white) are likely no longer blooming when this is finally posted. If you visit the wetland now, the dominant color may be yellow, with tickseed sunflower and the native tuberous sunflower called "jerusalem artichoke" taking over the stage.
This spicebush silkmoth (Callosamia promethea) is showing its appreciation of our work. Last year, we rescued some small spicebush from the lower dam of Mountain Lakes and transplanted them close to the greenhouse at Mountain Lakes House. After the effort to keep them watered through the long drought this summer, it's flattering that the caterpillar showed up to eat a portion of our fine crop. Spicebush, as is typical of native plants, gives a portion of its leaves to charity, which is to say it provides food for the native insects that specialize in consuming it. The spicebush swallowtail is another example.
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About a dozen of us congregated this past Saturday morning for a nature walk along the canal towpath, using our collective wisdom to interpret the myriad sorts of plant life we encountered.
Where the land between the canal and Carnegie Lake widens towards Harrison Street, we gazed out across rich undergrowth flourishing beneath scattered oaks, and talked of how low-level fire--the Indian's horticultural tool-of-choice--once fashioned landscapes much like this. The open canopy allows native shrubs like elderberry (photo) to thrive. We (which is to say my parents) used to make pies and jelly out of these. Sometimes the birds pick them clean, sometimes they don't. Looks like a good crop this year.
The abundant tiger swallowtail butterflies were out and about, drawing the attention of our youngest participant.
And, in a solemn event at the Harrison Street end of the walk, Jim Manganero photographed my ceremonial "finally getting around to putting some plant info in the brochure box that a boy scout so nicely built several years ago." I guess I wanted to make sure the box was going to withstand the test of time before putting it to use.
If peak bloom falls on a week when there's no one at the school to appreciate it, does it make a sound? They say the composer Scriabin could see colors in music, so it's not farfetched to hear a fusion of rock and jazz in this blooming frenzy, a foretelling of what will emanate from the building just beyond it come September.
In full voice, for anyone passing by on Walnut Street, are Hibiscus moscheutos (white or pink), boneset and daisy fleabane (white), cutleaf coneflower, sunflower and black-eyed susan (yellow), cardinal flower (red), and pickerel weed (blue).
As any self-respecting pollinator could tell you, this is prime time for summer wildflowers down along the towpath between the D&R Canal and Carnegie Lake.Meet on the canal towpath at Washington Rd. (not Washington St, which is in Kingston). Parking is available just to the south of the canal. Latecomers can find us heading downstream towards Harrison St.
Jim Consolloy (left), recently retired head of grounds at Princeton University, handed us a list of the ten trees he was about to introduce us to on a short walk along Williams and Olden Streets. Jim is gaining an encyclopedic knowledge of local street trees in the process of conducting a detailed inventory for the borough.
My daughter liked the coupon aspect in particular, and also brought home some souvenirs. The large leaf comes from one of two cucumber magnolias known to be growing in Princeton. (A NJ native, the other specimen can be admired at Marquand Park.) The tiger swallowtail had left its wings behind, as a kind of artistic legacy after donating its body to the food chain.
Catfish and eels, catfish and eels. Wish they could tell us just how it feels, to have the water pulled out from over them.
They were joined by a two foot long eel, whose long dorsal fin was visible through the glare.
The previous week, before the lake was drained, workers from Princeton Hydro with a smelly generator and small flatbed boat had paddled around trying to shock and collect fish.
But a far more effective and cost-effective method was later demonstrated by neighborhood kids, who hauled bucket after bucket of fish out of the muddy, shrunken waters, to be carried off to private ponds or dumped in the lower lake, which has yet to be drained.
Mixed in with the multitudes of miniature sunfish were a minnow of some sort,
and a sucker.
One of the most elegant pollenators to visit the backyard is a moth that looks and acts like a small hummingbird.
They're also called hawkmoths, in the Sphynx moth family.
The official groundbreaking ceremony for the dam restoration at Mountain Lakes took place today. The photo includes township staff, elected officials, members of Friends of Princeton Open Space and the Princeton Historic Preservation Commission, consulting engineers, and the contractor who has agreed to take on all the work.
