01/21/2022
As my health falters memories come to mind of a wonderful life lived, hope you all live a wonderful life as well
Caterpillars and Folgers Coffee
My wife, the saint she is, will tell you that I can obsess over things that grab my attention. And she does it usually with a classic rolling of the eyes and a little bit of a sigh. And I have done this my entire life. Can you imagine the first time I was at my Grandparents and found Monarch caterpillars? And in the sixties, the wild things were everywhere in Cali. I would ignore the “don’t bring anything alive home” from my mom every single time. She could stand the caterpillars, would smile at the frogs and toads and salamanders, but when I started bringing home snakes and some pretty big Alligator Lizards even I could tell she was beginning to get worried. But did I stop, nope.
It was a summer day and a couple of friends and I were doing the unthinkable. We had grabbed a bow and arrow from the garage…………….well I won’t go into the details but there is a scene in the movie “Grown Ups” that explains what we were doing; thank god it did not have the same results. But while I made a quick dive onto the field of my school I saw a cobalt blue glimmer of a spined caterpillar on a Sorrel growing in the field. And another, then another. At the end of the day, dozens of really cool caterpillars. Buckeyes. Could it be that I did not have to go to my Grandparents? I would find out the answer was a resounding yes when in the same field a friend and I noticed a vine hanging over the fence of the backyards adjacent to the schools field. It was Passion flower and covered in Gulf Fritillary caterpillars. Incredible orange and purple striped caterpillars with spines. So now it was on!
Folgers Coffee cans were the perfect container. Clean it, cut slots in the plastic top and you had a container that could hold a lot of caterpillars and would easily fit on a Schwinn rack. And so began the hunt. By the time I would leave home at the age of 18, I will have released tens of thousands of butterflies and moths back into the wild. My friend lived across the street so we would get up early, each Saturday and set out. We had already cleaned out the field at the school and every single caterpillar off the Passionflower, so now it was just a search for more or something new. I already had a lot of Monarchs from my trip to my Grandparents. There were drainage ditches about a mile down the street that had an abandoned road alongside it, with railroad tracks on the other side. It was worth a shot. This first trip would lead to years of trips following the railroad track all the way to the edge of the San Francisco Bay. But that first trip hit the jackpot. Narrow Leaved milkweed lined the side of the road and all along the railroad tracks. We discovered that as the trains passed by when the seed pods split, the force of the train pulled the seeds and they floated along with the train and dispersed into open ground. We filled our cans with fat Monarch caterpillars. Then by accident, my friend while looking for caterpillars on a milkweed, looked up at the fennel growing alongside it and noticed little black caterpillars that looked like bird droppings, ok p**p on the flat yellow flowers. There were several on it. As we picked the flower, we looked down at the leaves and found huge green and black striped caterpillars. And as we grabbed one, orange antlers popped out of their heads with a rather nasty odor. Cool!!!!!!We had discovered Anise Swallowtails. Or as Kellie would say “ A Nice Swallowtail” makes me laugh so hard every time! Another can would be filled that day, and on multiple trips for years.
Then one day we were walking home from school and noticed caterpillars hanging from a houses gutter like Christmas Lights. An Elm Tree in the front yard was covered with them. Dark gray spiny caterpillars with red dots. We had stumbled upon hundreds of Mourning Cloaks. A quick knock on the door and we were allowed to take as many as we liked.
A trip to the local Swenson’s Ice Cream Shop to buy candy, led to a big, big discovery. As we past a front yard a lady was in a bit of distress looking at her birch tree. We stopped and she said look at this thing, have we ever seen anything like it. Turns out, no we had not. In front of us clinging to a limb was the biggest caterpillar we had ever seen. Lime Green with little dots it was impossible to remove from its stem. Very well camouflaged it was the coolest thing yet. Looking at the same limb, there was another. Then looking at the tree, it was loaded with huge caterpillars which the lady gladly allowed us to remove. A quick look at the Encyclopedia Britannica, and we had found Polyphemus moths. The neighborhood had hundreds of houses with White Birch trees in the front yard. And all of them had caterpillars. That first year, we found nearly 500 caterpillars. And even when I moved home and had kids of my own, I found a few cocoons on the trees as it was easier to wait until winter when you could see the cocoons attached to the limbs rather than trying to find these green caterpillars in the Birch foliage. As a kid, any overwintering cocoons were held by paperclips on my bedroom drapes, driving my mom nuts. They would hatch out in the spring and these big silk moths spent their first few hours of a very short life flitting about my bedroom. Oh and did I mentions that I asked my parents to grow tomatoes just for the Hornworms?
Red Admirals were found on Baby Tears in our garden and Painted Ladies on Hollyhocks that grew along the fence. That first year we released hundreds of Buckeyes, Monarchs, Anise Swallowtails, Gulf Fritillaries, Mourning Cloaks, Red Admirals, Painted Ladies, and Polyphemus Moths. All in containers holding water to keep the limbs fresh. I had to sweep the frass from the patio daily. These caterpillars ate an amazing amount of leaves. It was a full time job to just keep them fed. When my father passed and I would move into the family house again, I would add more and more plants to keep this going. But sadly the days of plenty had already began to disappear. The drainage ditches where we had originally collected toads and tree frogs had been cemented to allow a faster water flow. They were gone. The railroad tracks were sprayed to kill all those pesky weeds and the abandoned road was now mowed as weeds were unsightly. And all of the fields where Milkweed thrived were Apartments, Strip Malls, Fast Food and Parking Lots. The Elm Tree was gone, the school field was gone. Heavy pesticide use got rid of the Polyphemus and Gulf Fritillaries. By the late 80’s when I moved home and had kids of my own the end was already near. The days of a kid walking to school and seeing butterflies everywhere and stumbling across so many caterpillars they would fill a Folgers Coffee can had sadly passed. But I was still that kid at heart. Our garden would be transformed into a butterfly garden and we searched high and low and managed to find caterpillars, and once in our garden they thrived and multiplied. And for a few years we would all be back in time, releasing hundreds of butterflies back into the wild and watching cartoons on Saturday morning…………………………..oh and I broke the bow and arrows and threw them in the garbage. Rule #2, don’t let your kids do everything you did as a kid.
