It's a Ladybug's Life!

Letting Our Ladybugs be Free

My daughter was so excited to get an Insect Lore Ladybug Land habitat from one of her friends for her birthday.  At first, she wasn’t sure what to do with it since the live insects needed to be ordered and sent to our home via snail mail.  So she played with the enclosure for a few days, finding her smallest toys, which just fit in it.  I let her know what day the bugs would be arriving and explained to her that they would not look like ladybugs yet, but were larvae.  Fortunately, since she recently had a lesson on butterfly lifecycles at her preschool, the larval stage was fresh in her memory.

Nineteen little bugs arrived in a tube on a Friday.  My daughter anxiously watched as I slid the little creatures and their food into their new home and gave them a couple droplets of water.  But to my daughter, the larvae were so small and strange-looking, her attention started to waver.  I quickly found videos of ladybugs on the internet to keep her excitement high for these new bugs.  Luckily, by the next day, the larvae were nearly twice as big, very active, and much more visible.  The change was perfect to keep her interest high.  These bugs ate and ate and grew bigger and bigger each day.  My daughter even asked us to buy a magnifying glass to help her see them better.  

 

Because it was very important not to over water the little bugs, I took charge of giving them water using the pipette provided with the habitat.  My three year old doesn’t quite have the fine motor skills required to gently squeeze the bulb of the pipette to consistently produce only one droplet of water at a time yet.  So after my watering chore each day, she practiced using the pipette herself, which is an excellent activity for kids her age.

Larva, Pupa, and Adult Stages

On day five, the first larva turned into a pupa.  By the end of the next day, they had all changed, and then there was no movement in the habitat for days.  Fortunately, the instructions gave us an estimate of when to expect the adults to emerge; therefore, we knew we didn’t have long to wait.  We were prepared with a rehydrated raisin cut in half for their food.  And four days later, our first adult ladybug emerged!  The rest followed over the next two days.  I was lucky enough to watch and record one emerging using time-lapse videography while my daughter napped.  This allowed me to show her later what was happening without her shorter attention span preventing her from watching in real time.  She was amazed and watched the video over and over again!

Mating Behavior

When a ladybug emerges from the pupa stage, it climbs out of the bottom of the hard exoskeleton, leaving it behind.  The newly emerged adult is soft and off-white in color without spots.  It rests and dries its body for awhile, stretching its wings and legs only occasionally while slowly gaining its familiar ladybug coloring.  During the first day, it doesn’t really move much.  Then on day two as an adult, it moves everywhere, taking short breaks to eat and drink.  We even witnessed mating behavior!  Our ladybugs seemed to only calm down when the lights were off.  It was fun watching them travel during the day, but it made them difficult to count while my daughter eagerly watched.  I’m happy to report, while they were at rest, I counted and all nineteen insects made it to the adult stage.

Last Saturday, we turned them loose.  It was nice to watch all of the ladybugs crawl away.  A few even attempted to fly away.  My daughter was a little sad and questioned several times why we needed to set them free, but she enjoyed watching the bugs crawl over the plants and in the leaf litter.  She agreed that it will be nice to have them living in our yard; although, she thinks we’ll be able to find them again easily.  Luckily, the ladybug habitat is able to be used again and again for raising more ladybugs!

Making a Ladybug Keepsake

Since this project took two weeks, I decided we needed to make a keepsake of our experience.  So I bought a small canvas and acrylic paint to make a handprint bush with 19 ladybugs made from fingerprints.  I painted the canvas blue the day before and let it dry overnight.  The next day, I painted my daughter’s hand a dark green color and let her put her handprint on the canvas, with my help, and we let it dry.  For the next step, I painted her other hand a light green color and again helped her to put her handprint on the canvas on top of the first handprint.  The handprints made the bush.  After the bush was completely dry, I painted her index finger red, and she proceeded to make 19 fingerprints on the bush, one for each ladybug we raised.  After that was dry, I took a black paint pen and completed the look of each ladybug.  It turned out to be a beautiful keepsake of our first experience with ladybugs that we will never forget!

Ladybug Keepsake

Earth Day, Every Day!

Enjoying the Great Outdoors

Today is Earth Day!  It’s a day to celebrate the Earth and promise to take care of it.  I’m glad we have a reminder every year, but shouldn’t we be doing these things every day?  So for Earth Day, this week, next week, next month, and throughout the year, take time to enjoy our Earth.  Smell the sweet honeysuckle flower, listen to a mockingbird sing, feel the grass between your fingers and toes, watch a honeybee collect pollen, and discover something new in the great outdoors!  Only then will we understand how invaluable our planet is so we will take care of it.

Limpkin Crossing Our Path

My daughter and I did talk about Earth Day.  We took a walk around a pond to try to discover something new.  We watched ducks and smelled flowers, but our find of the day was a limpkin (Aramus guarauna) crossing our path.  This bird is listed as a Species of Special Concern in Florida, and they’re somewhat rare.  It used to be common; however because its main food source (the Florida apple snail, Pomacea paludosa) has become scarce, the limpkin likewise has become an unusual sight.  The limpkin was the ideal discovery for Earth Day, I think.  My daughter learned that we need to protect the Earth by reducing, reusing, and recycling and keeping our natural areas natural in order to support the perfect habitat for the apple snails and so also protect limpkins.  

Since my daughter has been enjoying the decorations of recent past holidays, we decided to decorate for Earth Day too!  Unfortunately, Earth Day decorations are not very common, so we made our own.  We used coffee filters and washable markers (Crayola has recycled plastic markers made with solar energy!)  My daughter and I colored the filters to look like the Earth, or at least we used mainly green and blue markers.  Then we took a spray bottle filled with water and sprayed the filters just enough to let the colors run.  Each decoration turned out beautiful and unique.  I wrote, “Earth Day, Every Day!” on one of them.  We taped them to our lanai door, which is our entrance to the great outdoors!  They are a little stronger than paper, so we can use them year after year for our Earth Day decorations.  You can too!  This is a simple craft that looks great no matter what your child’s coloring skills are.  Enjoy your Earth Day!

Craft Supplies

Coloring a Coffee Filter

Spraying with Water

Decorating for Earth Day

Ready for Earth Day!  Let's Go Outside!

Story Time – Owly & Wormy, Friends All Aflutter!

“Story Time” will be a recurring feature on Mommy Nature, introducing children’s books with a nature theme.  Watch for them in the future to help expand your child’s library!

Story Time – Owly & Wormy, Friends All Aflutter!, written and illustrated by Andy Runton

Last week, my daughter’s preschool class focused on butterflies.  They learned about a butterfly’s life cycle and made a butterfly craft.  I can only imagine the stories my daughter may have told as a three year old butterfly expert, since she was a monarch butterfly for Halloween last year and one of her earliest toy sets was made-up of models of the life cycle.  She and I have also made up a story about her and butterflies that she asks me to tell on an almost daily basis now.  And perhaps she recalled a favorite book we found at the library a few months ago titled, Owly & Wormy, Friends All Aflutter!

This is an excellent book for pre-readers as it has very few words and cartoon style illustrations.  In fact, it relies on pictures to tell its story.  The book is very well illustrated, giving the reader enough information to follow the story, but still leaving a little to interpretation and the imagination. It is a perfect book to help pre-readers understand the story through its illustrations and hopefully will help a child use pictures in other books to facilitate learning to read words.

In this book, Owly and Wormy are friends who really want to attract butterflies to their garden.  They learn that they need special plants to attract butterflies, so they go to a garden center and purchase a milkweed plant.  With expectations of attracting several butterflies, they are disappointed to find that two eggs were laid on the plant that hatched into two very hungry caterpillars, who start eating Owly and Wormy’s beloved milkweed!  Soon Owly and Wormy grow to love the caterpillars, but just then the caterpillars metamorphose into butterflies.  Owly and Wormy don’t understand and think the caterpillars have just gone away.  They wait and wait for the caterpillars to return, but the caterpillars never do.  The story teaches about the life cycle of the butterfly through Owly and Wormy’s discoveries.  And since the book is predominantly a series of illustrated pictures, the story can be told with the help of your child.  By asking your son or daughter what happens in each sequential picture, you help your child develop reasoning skills!

Supplies

There are numerous crafts you can do to supplement any butterfly lesson, of course.  My daughter and I decided to make yarn and bead butterflies this week.  We used pipe cleaners, yarn, beads, and the cardboard from a roll of toilet paper. 

Winding Yarn

I cut the pipe cleaners in half, while my daughter wound about a yard of yarn around the cardboard from a roll of toilet paper.  Then she picked out four to five beads and strung them on one half of a bent pipe cleaner (hint – make sure bead holes are large enough to be easily strung on a pipe cleaner by your preschooler). 

Stringing Beads

Then I carefully slid the yarn off the toilet paper cardboard, making sure I didn’t overlap any of the loops of yarn, and placed the middle of the yarn loops inside the bent pipe cleaner.  Next, I twisted the two ends of the bent pipe cleaner as close to the last bead as possible to make a tight fit and to make the antennae.  Then, I fluffed up the yarn to look like the wings of a butterfly!  These could be used as spring decorations anywhere in the house, or attach a magnet to the back of some of them with tacky glue to put on the refrigerator.  I added a hair clip to one and made a barrette, which my daughter wore with pride all day!  She also just enjoyed playing with the butterflies, as you might guess.

Butterfly Craft

Please let me know if you’ve come across a gem of a story for children about nature.  You’re welcome to tell me a little about the book and why you like it.  Books are always a favorite for young children; and I, like many of you, am always looking for the perfect addition for my daughter’s bookshelf. 

Butterfly Barrette

Don't Mess with Baby

Just one of the many local sandhill cranes

I love this time of year because our local sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis) are out and about with their chicks.  They are teaching their new hatchlings the ropes of getting around the neighborhood, such as what bugs to eat and even how to watch out for traffic when crossing the road.  The traffic part is probably most important since a large number of them live in central Florida all year, where traffic is only becoming more and more congested.  So these smart birds teach their young to pay attention to the cars on the road.  But like any parent encounters, their youngsters sometimes want to try new things on their own, and the mommy and daddy birds can only try their best to make new discoveries safe for their children.

Last weekend, our family was going out for some family fun.  My husband was driving, I was in the front passenger seat, and my daughter was in her seat in the back.  We saw a family of three sandhill cranes ahead of us right next to the road.  This always excites me as I point them out to my daughter who loves seeing them.  The adult birds are easy to spot since they can stand anywhere between three to six feet tall with a wingspan of at least six feet long.  So we slowed the car to a crawl.  

Unfortunately, slowing down allowed the baby and one parent to step into the road and block our path completely.  Not only that, while the chick haphazardly meandered in the road with no recognition of danger from cars, the adult looked straight at us with threatening eyes.  Then it walked aggressively toward the front of our vehicle.  I presume that since we didn’t back off and go the other direction (there was a line of cars behind us so we couldn’t) the adult proceeded to demonstrate its bravery and willingness to protect its young at all costs by taking on our vehicle with a few pecks to the front bumper.  When that still didn’t get us to move away, the crane continued to walk around our vehicle and pounded on the front passenger door where I was sitting.  

I looked at this animal with mixed emotions.  I was worried about the damage it was doing to the car for one thing.  But at the same time, from one parent to another, I would do the same to protect my child.  I gave the bird a smile as my husband slowly drove around the crane family.  With a few more bangs to the rear of our car, my daughter, hearing the bird's knocks and sensing our concerns as we drove around the sandhill cranes, asked what happened.  I told her the bird was being a good parent!  Mommies and Daddies protect their babies from anything.  Always!

It was a great introductory teaching moment as to why we need to be cautious around animals.  With a little bit older children, I used to teach them that animals generally have a reason if they bite, sting, pinch, scratch, etc.  Usually it’s because they are in fear for their lives.  Animals don’t know what a person’s intentions are, and people are bigger and stronger than most animals, which alone can be very frightening.  Another reason for animal attacks, especially at this time of year, is due to parents protecting their young.  That’s why you may have heard the phrase, “Don’t mess with baby bear.”  In this case, we were shown not to mess with baby sandhill crane either.

Luckily, there was no damage to our vehicle, but it was a great reminder to give these animals their space.  And they show no fear when it comes to protecting their babies!  Please watch out for wildlife during your daily travels, especially at this time of year.  After all, animal babies can’t take the hand of their mommy or daddy to cross the street like our babies do!