This is my fourth week monitoring my milkweed plants. Sounds boring, doesn't it? But it's not boring. In fact sometimes it's downright thrilling. The mosquitoes were not as aggressive this weekend as they were last weekend so the experience was much more pleasant. But I did let out a few quiet screams and other sounds of terror. I have to bend down and examine every leaf on 22 plants. I look for caterpillars and monarch eggs. Every white blob must be examined with my magnifying lens. I don't know how strong the lens is but it's strong enough to make my fingerprints look textured. When I'm down close examining a white blob and it starts crawling toward me I can't help but go, "Bleeargh," and stand up. That wasn't an egg, it was a round white little bug with two eyes and a mouth. Another time I was examining a real monarch egg when a mosquito landed on the leaf right next to the egg. The mosquito suddenly appeared in my field of magnification. Man, it was giant and very scary. The proboscis seemed dangerously huge. I let out a little scream. This monarch monitoring can be exciting. The photo above is from a monarch monitoring website. You can see the male monarch is different from the female because he has two black blobs on the second black vein from the body on the lower wing.
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