Wow! very nice.

Its really not wise to handle them so much. All that's needed is to gently take them outside and put them somewhere to hang and finish hardening their wings; like on your flowers or a tree branch. They need about an hour after emerging to fully prepare their wings.

They should never be handled when they first emerge. Give them time to hang and pump their wings out. Then you can take them outside to finish drying so that you don't have to chase them around and risk damaging them.

{{gwi:543986}}

He eclosed in the morning and I didn't release him until I got home from work. Some of them like to hang out with me a little, I suppose to thank me for all the good food :)

Hi Weed-
Thanks, you've inspired me to put up a couple of videos:
Polydamas pupating
Eastern Black Swallowtail eclosing

Those are great! What kind of dog do you have? :)

Ha I was going to include a note to ignore the dog. That is a neighbor dog who sometimes just sits and barks for fun. My chocolate lab only barks for good reason. And he knows better than to do it during eclosure!

Also meant to say Weed 30, that your soundtrack was definitely much better!

Thanks - I am not very video savvy, but discovered there are music clips available on You Tube. It's easy to add one, but hard to pick one out!

Here is another that I did with a Monarch. It cracks me up at about :43 through :50 in the video...when the piano gets into the high keys, it looks like the Monarch is keeping time with her little feet!

Monarch

That was great!! The air-piano playing monarch!
I did not know about the soundtracks on youtube, here I thought you had some complicated mixing studio. Although I'd like to know how you faded the different scenest together like that.
Thanks for sharing!!

fighting8r - the fading between scenes was an accident. I was using Windows Movie Maker, which came with WinXP. When I was trying to edit, I overlapped two sections of the video, and that's how it came out. I like it too, but not sure I could actually do it again on purpose ;)