WCAX.COM Local Vermont News, Weather and Sports-Monarch Moments

This time of year, we like to collect a few Monarch caterpillars and keep them in the newsroom to watch them transform into beautiful butterflies!

All you have to do, is look for the caterpillars in a field with some of their favorite food, milkweed! You can keep them in a glass vase or big jar, if you leave them with plenty of fresh milkweed leaves and cover the top with some cheesecloth so they can still breathe! You'll want to clean the vase or jar, and keep fresh milkweed leaves in there for them regularly.

In a week or two, your caterpillar will attach himself to a stem, or the top of the glass, and hang upside down like a "J".

This is when things get really cool! His skin actually splits from the bottom to the top, and falls off, revealing a wiggling green lump, the chrysalis. The chrysalis shrinks and hardens, and is nicely decorated with gold dots.

But that's not the only cool part. About two weeks after that, the chrysalis starts to look kind of grayish green, and then it becomes transparent and you can actually see the orange and black of the butterfly inside.

The chrysalis wiggles around again, and splits open and the butterfly pulls himself out, headfirst. In the beginning he's pretty rumpled and crumpled looking, but once he pumps the fluid from his abdomen into his wings, they plump out and start looking better.

He'll hang around for a couple of hours, letting his wings fill out and get stronger, and then he'll start flapping them a bit to check them out. Eventually he'll fly away and get ready for his trip south!

Monarchs migrate south in the fall, mostly to Mexico. Enjoy them while they are here!

By Sharon Meyer