Month: October 2017

I love fall! Butterflies are abundant this time of year. Monarchs are migrating south. Autumn leaves are starting to show their crimson, orange and golden colors. And, then there are pumpkins!

Here are a few ideas on how you can celebrate this wonderful time of year with butterflies and pumpkins.

Monika Moore, the California Butterfly Lady, always creates fun fall butterfly displays using Monarchs she’s raised.

Heather Ward of Heather Ward Wildlife Art carved this Monarch butterfly. She explained, “When carving a pumpkin, it is important to cut out pieces in the right order. Start with the smallest first. In this case, I had a ton of tiny dots. Those were actually the easiest to put in – I just used a drill bit to poke holes in. Then I worked on the smaller patches on the wings, then the larger ones. I still broke a few lines, but it held together. Last, I carved the antennae and upper part of the background circle, then the lower part of the circle.”

This adorable little girl and her butterfly won the 2014 This Old House Pumpkin Carving Contest.

Need some help carving a butterfly? Download this free stencil with instructions from Better Homes and Gardens.

Don’t like scooping out the pumpkin seeds and getting your hands all mushy? Here’s one more project idea that involves absolutely no “pumpkin guts”. These three butterfly-themed pumpkins were carved using surface carving, a design is created by scraping away the tough outer pumpkin rind and creating texture in the softer flesh beneath.

Don’t feel like you are creative? You can carve a pumpkin using butterfly-shaped cookie cutters and a rubber mallet to make these butterfly designs.

Hollow out each pumpkin as you would for traditional carving. Then, center a cookie cutter on one side and gently tap with the rubber mallet until the cookie cutter goes all the way through the flesh. Start in the center and work side-to-side to avoid bending the metal. Remove the cut pumpkin along with the cutter, and clean up the edges with a sharp paring knife.

You might want to consider purchasing a Professional Pumpkin Carving Tool Kit to help you carve your pumpkins.

Happy Butterfly Halloween!

Halloween is just around the corner. Do you have your costume ready? Here are some butterfly-themed costumes you might like.

What an adorable idea for a couple!

Here is another cute duo.

This family dressed up as the whole lifecycle of the Monarch butterfly.

Don’t you love this adorable little butterfly?

Here is an adorable DIY Monarch butterfly costume.

This video shows how to make Monarch butterfly wings out of garbage bags.

Even dogs can fly!

Sometimes a child-created costume can be the best!

And if you are not creative and just too busy to make a butterfly costume, you can always find one online.

Hoping to see lots of butterflies this Halloween!

All across Canada, in the northeastern United States and in the Midwest, people have reported seeing scores of Painted Lady butterflies (Vanessa cardui).

In fact, the National Weather Service posted an image of a bewildering blob this week of a great mass of colors spread across Denver and neighboring counties. Weather scientists weren’t sure what to make of it. At first, their best theory was that they were looking at birds. But it turns out that it was migrating Painted Lady butterflies.

Todd Stout, of Raising Butterflies, said, “We are experiencing an unprecedented southward fall migration of the Painted Lady butterfly. In all the 30 years I’ve been studying butterflies in Utah, I have never seen anything like this–not in the fall. It is even more pronounced east of us in Colorado and the midwestern states. Yes, Painted Ladies migrate north into Utah from Mexico during the late winter/early spring. This is well documented and well known amongst local butterfly lovers.”

The Painted Lady is native throughout the United States. In fact, it is the most widely-distributed butterfly in the world. It is found throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, and Central America. It is not a permanent resident in the eastern United States, but quasi-periodically migrates there from the deserts of the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico. These migrations are sporadic, sometimes enormous, and often follow rainy periods in those deserts.

Painted Lady larvae feed on a wide variety of host plants from the families Compositae (especially thistles), Boraginaceae, Malvaceae (especially the hollyhock Alcea rosea), common mallow (Malva neglecta), and a number of legumes including Iowa soybeans.

Some confuse these butterflies with the Monarch (Danaus plexippus). While their color scheme may be similar to Monarch butterflies, Painted Ladies have eyespots on the underside their wings in addition to brown coloring on both sides. Painted ladies lack the vein pattern that monarchs are best known for. Painted ladies are also smaller than Monarchs, with a wingspan measuring less than 3 inches.

Thanks to favorable temperatures, there has been a huge influx of Painted Lady butterflies this fall. Some observers have spotted more than 100 in a single garden! To attract these and other butterflies to your garden you can hang up fruit inside a suet feeder.