Whatever happened to big, fuzzy yellow caterpillars?

The city spraying to prevent West Nile Fever has decimated the butterfly population , I use to sit on my terrace in the fall and marvel at the hundreds of Monarch Butterflies that would pass over my building as they migrated south.

This year I saw about fifty

When i was a kid a friend of mine and myself would catch caterpillars and put them in a covered fish tank,feed them milkweed , watch them become pupas and set them free when they completed their transformation in to butterflies.

We could never understand how they would know where to go or what to do.

I to this day am amazed, as i use to have problems just getting home from Snookys.(':P')

raw wrote: I have not seen a wild frog or toad any where in New York State since the mid 1990s.

are you kidding

you can't fall over without landing on a disorderly frenchman in ps

Karl the Druid wrote: [quote=raw]I have not seen a wild frog or toad any where in New York State since the mid 1990s.

are you kidding

you can't fall over without landing on a disorderly frenchman in ps

No, I am not. I used to see toads EVERYWHERE and I'd pick them up because I am retarded and they would pee on my hands.

Now I spend less time outside, but I have spent much time in country settings over the last several summers in upstate New York and on long island where locals tell me they have not seen any frogs in the last decade. Most locals blame amphibion decline on chemical sprays.

In brooklyn, I spend a lot of time in a yard that is full of nothing but snails -- you can find enough snails in 30 minutes to feed a familly of four.

raw wrote: I have not seen a wild frog or toad any where in New York State since the mid 1990s.

***************************

They may have evolved into Yuppies.

Garfunky wrote: lol at the yuppie thang.

i saw a huge frog in someones very very overgrown backyard.
6 ave center slope.

when i noticed it move out of the corner of my eye,
my first thought was o crap thats a big rat !
(musta been jumping)
closer look
i see a frog big enough to bully small children with blue hats.

****************************

Thats why I won't let my kids wear blue hats.

raw wrote:

No, I am not. I used to see toads EVERYWHERE and I'd pick them up because I am retarded and they would pee on my hands.

Oh wow. Its amazing the things you forget about. I could start a juice bar with all the toad pee that passed over my hands between birth and the late 1990s.

I love holding toads, so I was very good at ignoring the pee.

I wonder if R-Kelly was into playing with toads as a kid. :twisted:

this comes from the NYTimes re: monarch butterly winter grounds.

New York Times by Andrew C Revkin, March 7, 2008

Illegal loggers have chopped their way deep into unique forest reserves in a mountain range in central Mexico where millions of monarch butterflies from eastern North America roost for the winter, according to researchers who posted satellite photographs of the area on a NASA Web site Wednesday evening.

Forests of oyamel fir trees in Michoacán and Mexico States have for thousands of years been a winter haven for the resplendent orange and black butterflies, the most famous “charismatic megafauna” of the insect world, said Lincoln P. Brower, a professor emeritus of biology at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, who has studied the butterflies and their shrinking winter habitat for decades.

The images, posted online at earthobservatory.nasa.gov, show fresh clear-cutting in an area that held large butterfly colonies last year, as seen in aerial surveys, said Daniel Slayback, a geographer based at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who has been tracking the butterfly wintering grounds with Dr. Brower. The images were taken by the commercial Ikonos satellite for the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary Foundation, a group with which Dr. Brower is associated.

“There are a number of sawmills around the area that are busy eating away at the forest,” Dr. Slayback said. “These are organized groups that go in armed sometimes. This is wholesale clear-cutting.”

The photographs show that cutting is taking place inside a protected “core zone” established by presidential decree in November 2000, according to the NASA Web page.

The migration of the butterflies, and their choice of this region as a winter habitat, remains a mystery, although the forests are thought to offer the right balance of coolness and humidity to keep them alive through the winter without their exhausting fat reserves. Each March, they return north.