Butterfly Flutterby

Robert Graves – Flying Crooked

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has- who knows so well as I?-
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the acrobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

(Robert Graves, Wimbledon, 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985)

You can hear Robert Graves reading this poem and others on this page

Incorporating butterflies into your curriculum is a fantastic way to learn about pollination- and without pollination – we have nothing! We have butterfly larvae arriving in the mail sometime this week from Lucy Perna of Lucy’s Butterfly Farm. I found her name on the International Butterfly Breeder’s Association website.

Our painted lady larvae will be transfered into individual containers with food and we’ll watch them grow for a week or so until they climb up onto the lid of their containers and spin themselves a chrysalis. From there we move them to a mesh pop-up laundry basket and wait for them to hatch. If you’ve never watched a butterfly hatch you are missing out on a bit of magic! Once they have hatched and their wings are dry we will release them at our school’s butterfly garden. We are so excited!

If you haven’t got a clue about butterflies a good place to learn will be at the 5th Annual Monarch Butterfly Festival this Sunday at the Living Prairie Museum:

Don’t forget to join us this Sunday, July 15th for the 5th Annual Monarch Butterfly Festival here at Living Prairie Museum (2795 Ness Ave). The event is being held from 12-4 pm. It is free to attend and promises to be a lot of fun for the whole family. Here is the tentative schedule:

12:15   Guided Prairie Hike- learn why Living Prairie Museum is prime habitat for butterflies with a knowledgeable naturalist

12:30   Storytelling – join Joe McLellan as he recounts his traditional tale of “Nanabosho and the Butterflies”

1:15     Guest Speaker- “Flying zoos: the fauna that lives on birds” with University of Manitoba entomologist Terry Galloway

1:45     Guided Prairie Hike-learn why Living Prairie Museum is prime habitat for butterflies with a knowledgeable naturalist
1:45     Storytelling – join Joe McLellan as he recounts his traditional tale of “Nanabosho and the Butterflies”

2:15     Guest Speaker “Insects in the City”- meet City Entomologist Taz Stewart as he discuss insects of Winnipeg.

3:00     Butterfly Gardening Workshop- prairie expert John Morgan shows you how to bring butterflies to your backyard.

3:45     Butterfly Release and Closing Remarks

Other activities that will be going on all day include: face painting, butterfly crafts, butterfly life-cycles station, geocaching, street painting, meet an entomologist, native prairie plant sale and more!

Or you can join the Monarch Teacher’s Network of Canada and attend their upcoming Teaching and Learning with Butterflies Event July 17th& 18th at Assiniboine Park. Manitoba Nature Summit Inc. is currently working to have these folks attend the resource fair at the 2012 Nature Summit and maybe we can work out a butterfly workshop for the next Nature Summit…

If none of these things are going to work for you then please check out The Butterfly Website for curriculum ideas and tips on how to fund your own butterfly garden. At this Butterfly Conservation website out of the UK you can find more resources. And lastly here is a page with a bunch of butterfly art ideas.

ok. ttfn and enjoy those butterflies!