Monarchs Do End Up In Odd Places

I don't think there's anyone who minds having these little visitors.

I just find it amusing that I find them in strange places.

Once I found one happily stuck under the step on the Jeep.  The Jeep was 8 miles from home and I was getting ready for a workout and found it when I bent over to get my skate boot.

This one is on my porch.  It went from a pot, across the garden, found the support for the porch roof, and climbed up into the nook where I see it now.

Mind you, I can't really use my porch.  It's high summer and there is an insane amount of work going on in the house.  Oh and I seem to host the mosquito preservation society meeting any time I linger anywhere outside.

We found this little jade jewel way up high under the porch roof and we will make certain it is undisturbed.   Its little brain, now turned to mush in a pupa, decided that it would be best under an eve at about 8 feet above the ground instead of under a leaf somewhere.

I hope it makes it.  High Summer heat is kind of punishing, especially under a patio roof.

It's all about location.  I'm rather close to M.E.DePalma Park, and there are quite a few flowers there.  It's a good environment there.  Since I got here, and settled in we've planted many flowers and plants with the idea that we'd propagate anything that we liked that fits in with that goal, to help the butterflies.

In the case of the plant that the pupa came from, the plant was an "involuntary planting".  I had a nursery pot there and while waiting for something else to come up, the Milkweeds sprouted.  They were discovered by some rather insistent Monarchs, and at one point there were dozens of caterpillars on them.  Eaten to sticks, only the earliest hatchlings survived.  

Hopefully in a week or so, we'll see a beauty like this boy greet the day and seek out its best life here among the flowers.