To help the monarch butterfly, Texas writer Charlie Scudder decided to home-rear its caterpillars. Checking the milkweed in his garden one August evening he spotted two of the flamboyant black, white, and yellow-striped creatures. After naming them Pancho and Lefty after the Townes Van Zandt song, he moved them into a mesh butterfly cage. He checked on them several times a day, cleaning out their copious caterpillar poop, waiting with great anticipation to see them attach to the wall of the cage to form their chrysalises and eventually emerge as black and orange adult butterflies festooned with white spots.
But to Scudder’s dismay, one day Lefty began to shrivel. In a few hours, he was gone. Pancho was eaten by fire ants just before his transformation.
Convinced that the species is teetering on the brink of extinction, tens of…
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