Manly Cat Monday and Caterpillar Update

Mom said just yesterday that Audrey provides more cute photo ops than Simba, and then Simba came up next to Mom on the couch last night while she had the camera.

All the remaining caterpillars ate up all the parsley and either wandered away (Dad caught about 3 more of them and put them in the box) or formed the chrysali right on the parsley stems.      What is so interesting is the way they match their environment's color:   Look at this:

There are THREE like that!     Mother Nature is pretty interesting.    

Hummingbird

Kitties, after a LONG summer without sightings, we finally have a frequent visitor, a female ruby throated hummingbird.   

She has been drinking such a lot that Dad at one point thought she was TWO, but we have never seen them around together so we are fairly sure there is only one thirsty one.

Our feeder has test tube style tubes with red caps, and in this first, longer video, you can see her going to both of the tubes of sugar water.      Due to so much zooming, the picture is not super clear, but we think you will get to see enough.

   

In this second short video, she is feeding from the red bee balm flowers.      Excuse our comfiness towels across the deck railing to dry after the rain!

Audrey thinks she would be very nommy if only she could catch her, but we know that would make Dad very very upset.  However, GJ threw down the gauntlet by catching a sparrow the other day, so Audrey doesn't want to be outdone.

Our Prize from Glogirly and Photo Hunt Blue

Kitties, you probably remember that a couple of weeks ago, Katie and Waffles'  Glogirly had a VERY SPECIAL NUMBER BIRTHDAY and she had a contest to win a Glogirly Bag full of Glogirly Stuff. Well, we were very excited to end up being the winners, and at the end of last week, our prize arrived in the mail.     It took until today for Mom to take pictures of us with it, because usually one of us is asleep, and also because, as you know, the humans here have been busy with painting and preoccupied with caterpillars!

So here are a few pictures.  

In addition to the Glogirly themed items, there was a vial of high quality catnip, which Simba discovered right away - he has just batted it across the Glogirly bag:

Feeling the Love from the scent of nip, he sidled up to the Glogirly Cowbell:

Audrey found the Glogirly Bag very comfy, and also liked the catnip - she moved too fast to get a good picture when she was batting at the vial of nip.

Setting things up in a more organized fashion, you can see that we got the bag (Mom's favorite pink color), the Cowbell, Glogirly pen, magnet, one of the Katie is Accused cards showing the full cast, Katie is Accused pin, the catnip and a deck of Amazecats Next Top Cat cards - the 2 of hearts is ALLIE, of A Tonk's Tail!

Audrey checks out the full package:

and here is a closeup of Allie on the cards, Simba making sure to be partly in the picture.

Katie, Waffles and Glogirly, thank you SO MUCH!     We love everything!

AND today's Photo Hunt theme is Blue, and our carpet is BLUE-gray!!  

World Cat Day

We hope your humans treat you extra well today, kitties.  Sadly, we don't expect anything out of the ordinary around here.    But we do appreciate our safe home and our fuds, things many kitties don't really have.

Sparkle's posts from 2010 and 2011 are great - you can get to the link to them here.

At chez Simba and Audrey we continue on our caterpillar watch - the second chrysalis formed overnight, and we have another caterpillar on its way in the plexiglass box.     We think it takes about 14-20 days for the transformation to the butterfly.

Wordy Wednesday

We have our first chrysalis from the caterpillars!      It formed overnight, so we can't say really whether Tuesday or Wednesday would be the right answer.   So lets just say anybody who guessed either Tuesday or Wednesday was right!  So Katie Isabella, Annie, Cody, Island Cats, and Beaded Tail were all correct!

Now let us take you on a little journey about how this happens.     When the caterpillar is finished eating all it is going to eat, it does an extra large poop, and soon after that,  it drops from the plant, in our case onto the deck.    Dad was surprised that the first one to do that didn't look like one of the biggest ones so he put it back.   Two more times it dropped off and started to crawl away, so finally he took it seriously and put it into a plexiglass box with some twigs.       This was on Monday.   It hung out on a twig and by yesterday morning looked like this (notice the threads holding it to the twig and the curved shape - click to biggify):

View from the other side -  Audrey in the background (this IS a FELINE blog, after all!):

A little snuggle with Dad:

By yesterday afternoon we had a second caterpillar on its way towards becoming a chrysalis - in the background of this picture:

If we can count right, there seem to be four who motored off when we were not looking overnight on Monday night.  There once were 18, now only 14.    Here is a really big one:

And now this is what the humans saw first thing this morning:     The chrysalis is the center of the picture, looks like a piece of the twig sticking out.  

Here it is with the picture cropped.     If you look really closely you can still see the segmented nature towards the left side.     Overnight it must have gone through a green stage of the chrysalis but we were not watching then.   

The second one has not yet, but has its curved shape and threads in evidence.     Maybe we will be able to see more of the transition during the day.

Looks like rain today so we will put the box in the garage.      The plan is to try and capture another two of them but to let the others go and make their chrysali wherever their instinct tells them.  Of course we will release the butterflies into the yard when they emerge,

Caterpillar Sizes

Audrey's first Mom gave us the great idea to use a tape measure to show the sizes of the caterpillars.   That sure made sense because in the pictures there is nothing to compare to except the size of the parsley leaves, which of course can be quite varied.    ( we did get Dad's finger in one picture a couple of days ago).

So here are a few pictures we took of different sized caterpillars while Dad held a tape measure next to them.    Pictures are from 4:30 pm on Saturday, so by the time this posts they will be bigger.  

We think this guy is the biggest of all of them:  there seemed to be several about 1 1/2 inches long, but he seemed the very longest.   

A slightly smaller one (sorry for the focus).

These next two must have hatched later than the biggest ones.     You can see this guy is not even 1 inch.

And THIS little fella is about 1/2 inch long.

Photo Hunt "Guess"

Kitties, in less than two days all the caterpillars have gotten a lot bigger.   We would say almost doubled in size?     So here is for your guess:    can you help us guess how much longer before one makes the first chrysalis?   We can't promise to know for sure when (give us a guess of which day next week), because they tend to crawl away from the plant to do it, and we suspect they will go under the deck or even further way, but if we can, we will try to catch it as it shows its desire to leave the plant.

We hope at least one will reach that stage before all the parsley is gone.  There are quite a lot of caterpillars on the plant.   And they eat a LOT!     (can you see the little caterpillar poopy behind the one on the right?)

Thursday in Our Garden

So we recently showed you the Black Swallowtail Mama Butterfly hanging out near our parsley.   They like parsley, carrot tops and dill.  

Behold the "babies":

(Dad brought the parsley plant onto the upper deck).  Here is the full plant.

Here is a BIG guy!

Not everybody hatched at the same time.  This fella is smaller.

Here is an even smaller one.

Dad's finger for comparison.

A year ago we had quite a few like this but they consumed the parsley before they were all fully grown. Then came the hurricane and ..................

We are sort of hoping the birds pick off just enough of them that the others have enough parsley to get to the chrysallis stage.   

AND,  our tomatoes are yielding real, edible fruits:  today Dad picked these:

Wordless Wednesday