Butterfly Surgery

We try not to lose sight of the caterpillars as they are unintentionally brought into the house. You find them when your hand grazes one, and its “horns” erupt. If you see the bright orange prongs and lean closer to sniff the caterpillar, as a real predator might, you’ll be hit by a strange little smell. If you were that predator, and the horns didn’t scare you, maybe this offensive scent would.

To the modern human, the caterpillar does have a funk, but it’s so distinctive that you’re likely to sniff harder. What the insect emits is complex and sudden, beginning with a musky character then finishing sweet and vegetal.

Bug sniffing will never be as popular as nosing your favorite wine, but there are those beguiling moments when one can apprehend the composition of a butterfly in its entirety.

This one came in small and late. The strategy was to keep it fed but, just before it’s ready to make a chrysalis, move it to a protected spot outside, well aware that we are cheating nature, because killing frosts have come.

We presented the caterpillar with a bouquet of carrot greens and dill and let it live in the warm kitchen. Rapidly, a black, fuzzy, hyphen-sized worm grew into a much bigger, boldly striped creature. A lovable leaf eater with suction cups for feet, watch its careful advance and something deep — and Disney — inside of you, says, “Awwww!”

How the caterpillar grew so fast and gave us the slip was a sizable blunder on our part. As we scan all the places we’d fix our chrysalis to if we were caterpillars, I ask my mother hopeful questions. She knows a lot more about insects than I do and finds my positive speculations annoying. This butterfly is doomed.

Then, many days later, we find it. The caterpillar, far less flashy than its previous incarnation, is hidden and shaded, underneath the wood countertop. A “silken envelope” of its own making, the chrysalis, hangs at an angle; the narrower end is affixed to the bottom of the counter. The larger, more elaborate end is cradled by two gossamer strands that support the weight and secure the package.

I get a magnifying glass to study the structure. We try to devise a way, that does not include the removal of the kitchen counter, to get the butterfly-to-be, as nature intended, outside. With coaching from a friendly entomologist, we assemble the necessary tools: a razor blade, a piece of thread, a tongue depressor, a minuscule square of double-stick tape. It looks like surgery, and nothing of the patient is even remotely scaled to my hands or my touch.

Adjacent, on the kitchen table, are newspapers and magazines, presenting dilemmas that also are out of scale for my hands. Urgency is what you feel when you know you need to act. I position myself on the floor and calmly examine the chrysalis again. Focus is what you feel when you decide how you will act.

As my palm forms a safety net, my fingertips steady the insect. With the other hand, I press the razor to the wood and scrape loose each of the chrysalis’s three fastened points.

It is hard to handle something that is weightless. It is impossible to gauge its fragility and its sensitivity to your imprint. I blow on it to bring the weblike strands around, fanlike, not kinked, in order to reattach its base to the tongue depressor. My mother uses the thread, tied around the depressor, to secure its midsection, recreating, with the artificial line, the slope of its original position.

Acknowledging our intervention, we take it outside, to a protected place.