Monarch Caterpillar

Itai's dream come true. We saw a monarch caterpillar. Itai says, "We were watching it grow and grow. It will be a chrysalis and then a butterfly. We saw it in something that looked like milkweed. It was just splashing around in the leaves. "

I won't go home...

Itai caught a Sulphur the other day. When it was time that evening to release it, it decided to stick around for a few minutes, on Itai's hand. It even extended its proboscis and tried to taste Itai's thumb. Itai says it felt "good. It was trying to get on my hand." Then, it flew off into the evening.

Blue Jay

This Blue Jay was spotted in our friends Beth and Julia's backyard. Kathleen took the photo. Itai did not net the Blue Jay, but came perilously close with a gold finch!

Azure Butterfly

Itai is the Master Butterfly student. He nets them, constructs a habitat for a day, lets us photograph them, and then releases them each evening. Here is one of our recent catches, a beautiful Azure Butterfly.

Douglas-Evans Preserve: 13 June 2006

We spent the afternoon at the Douglas-Evans Nature Preserve a half mile from our house. We saw more wildflowers than we were able to show here, but here are some highlights. Itai describes the trip as: "We were silly. We were laughing. We found butterflies. We found some daisies. We found milkweed. Monarch butteflies eat milkweed."

We saw some Daisy Fleabane, pictured above. To the right, a similar flower is the Ox-Eye Daisy.

And, below, is a butterfly we saw. We think it was a "question mark butterfly" but didn't get enough to time to verify that identification.



















There were wide fields of crown vetch pictured right.

There was so much more, and we'll try to add entries with more flowers we've identified in the coming days.

A highlight of our trip was spotting a male Indigo Bunting, an incredible blue bird that didn't hold still long enough to let us get a picture.

June 7: A White Butterfly