Butterflies, Moths, and Fish (Picture Heavy)

Our GATE teacher planned a project involving her 4th grade students and one of the kindergarten classes in our lower school.  The kindergarten teacher secured some monarch butterfly caterpillars and each class was given a certain number of them to observe in their classrooms.  Our students kept logs and wrote their observations of the process of caterpillar turning into butterfly.  I'm not sure, but I believe the kindergarteners did something similiar with pictures.  They were supposed to get together to do a release, but because of some red tape, that didn't happen.  Instead our students tagged and released their butterflies here.  

A chrysalis at 11:00 and caterpillar at 4:00.

Becoming a butterfly.

The tag is that sticker you see on the lower wing of the butterfly.  It has tracking numbers on it.  It is a little tricky tagging them as you don't get a second opportunity to get it in the right place once it's stuck on. 

They left some orange slices and some blossoms in the container with them for food while they waited for release day.

This isn't one of the butterflies from school but one that I picked up from the street on the way back from fishing.  It was dead and a little battered up, but still pretty to look at and share.

Our little scientist at school.  Busy work for a 3-year-old and good fine motor practice squeezing the eyedropper to fill it and then empty it into the larger tube.  He looks so intense.  The school shared this picture with his mom and dad and she forwarded it to me.  What this doesn't show, that I was able to see on the video that I can watch from my desk, is the look on his face when the teacher took the filled tube, walked over to the sink, and spilled it out.  But then he started all over.

The night of the last concert for the summer, HWNSNBP and I went over to the dock about an hour before it was supposed to start to get in some fishing.  There was a large puddle in the middle of the parking lot when we walked over which we just walked around.  We weren't catching anything so we decided to leave after about 20 minutes or so.  When we turned around to leave the water had risen so much so that we were almost stranded there.  We did manage to find a little dry land on the far left to be able to get home without getting our feet wet, but the water continued to rise and people who hadn't arrived early couldn't get there, and the people on the dock were kind of stranded at this point.  A lot of people just parked on the sides of the road and opened there windows.  We are lucky enough to have a balcony in front that we can sit on to enjoy the music.

The results of another night's fishing.  It's been slim pickings this year.  

The two on the left will be given to a friend for smoking.  The other 3 were cleaned and cooked.

The fish below was a young striped bass and too small to keep legally.  There must have been a school of them that night because we caught three about the same size.  Luckily HWNSNBP knows his fish or we could have been fined for keeping these if the dockmaster had been there to check.

And a couple more butterfly pics from this weekend.