Did you know that one square mile of the Amazon rain forest can contain as many bugs as there are humans on the planet?

The other night I watched this show on Discovery HD called Bugs! (official site) and it was just amazing. It reminded me of how much I loved bugs when I was a kid and how I spent hours and hours running around with my butterfly net collecting any sort of bug that I could find. I also saved up several weeks of my allowance to buy a big book on bugs, I still have that book today.

My third grade teacher, Mrs. Downey, brought in a monarch caterpillar, something that I had caught a few of at the time. Now when I caught bugs I would bring them home, keep them in a jar or box for a few days and watch them and then let them go. Mrs. Downey kept her monarch caterpillar (this is what they look like) in a jar in her room but she didn’t let it go. Eventually her caterpillar formed itself a chrysalis and then we waited for the third stage of life, a butterfly.

I had never seen this happen and we lucked out that it happened during a class about a week later. Here is a picture of me watching the butterfly emerge.

Mrs. Downey, who is still to this day one of my all time favorite teachers, gave me that picture at the end of the year and she wrote this on the back “To Chris, Whose excitement and curiosity about the world was a wonderful thing”. Anyway, as you can probably tell in the picture (I’m the one up front) I was absolutely enthralled. It wasn’t long before I caught myself some monarch caterpillars to repeat the process.

I actually did it twice. On two separate occasions I caught a monarch caterpillar, brought it home, made sure I had some milkweed plants for it to eat and watched the caterpillar go through it’s different stages of life. I can still remember the excitement when I saw that they had created their chrysalis because I pretty much knew then that they were going to become butterflies. I remember checking about 132 times a day on the chrysalis looking for signs of change. When the butterfly did finally emerge nothing could drag me away from watching, even if the Smurfs made a special appearance on Thundercats. The coolest part was once the butterflies emerged I could walk around with them on my finger, I could even go outside with them and they wouldn’t fly away. This all happened when I lived in Illinois and on weekends our front yard was sort of a meeting place for the neighbor hood (we had a big corner lot) and I remember being outside with everyone with my pet butterfly on my finger, it was really cool. At the time I thought that the butterfly was tame and just loved me because I was the first thing it saw when it emerged and that is why it didn’t fly away. I later learned that it takes a while for their wings to dry and they are just incapable of flight.

Anyway, here are couple pictures of my butterflies.

I am still very fascinated with bugs. I no longer run around fields with a butterfly net but I am still known to pick up big bugs and let them crawl around my hand for a bit. I am also not one to freak out when I see a spider or anything like that. Bugs are cool.