Yes, Elisabeth, they successfully overwinter as chrysalides here - I've overwintered many, and their percentage rate of success is real high, nearly 100%. In general, giants are one of the easiest butterflies for me to raise. I didn't have a late season crop of giant cats to raise last year, so I don't have but a few chrsyalides now - come spring, I sure hope a female or two show up and lay some eggs on my host plants! Speaking of giant swallowtail host plants, the big freeze we had about a ?month ago caused the leaves on my orange tree to turn brown, and they've since all fallen off onto the ground. It looks like the stems are still alive, so hopefully it'll make new growth once spring sets in - I'm keeping my fingers crossed! I bought a 'Brown's Select' satsuma to plant this spring. It's supposed to be one of the cold hardiest satsumas, which are all more cold tolerant than most any other edible type citrus. I've got JILLIONS of pipevine swallowtail chrysalides, so I should get a good start this spring with them. Sherry

Bella---That's such good advise. I cover my beans, too, here on the southern Or coast. We have always had lots of ravens around in the fields and down by the stream, but the last couple of years some have moved into the yard. Especially One raven. He/she comes each evening and inspects everything that happened in his/her yard that day. Goes to the bird baths and washes and eats things it flew in with. Never knew they did that. Then makes a tour around the garden and yard. Last summer the parents brought three young ones each day to play, and I mean play, around in the yard. I got great laughs from their antics. Hope they do that again this summer. They are wonderful to watch but you DO have to protect veggies----beans and corn especially---until they are high enough so they leave them alone.

We are seriously thinking of moving because our neighbor, uphill cross the creek, feed the crows. The crows show up before day break on our roof screaming to be fed. She feeds them a couple of loafs of while bread from he upper deck that’s about 60 ft. from our bedroom window. There are 50 to 75 crows that show up daily. After she feeds them all but 3 or 4 leave they stay to keep watch. They scream at each other all day waiting for her to come out. When she comes out again they signal the rest and they all come back then about dinner time they all come back again for the leftovers and garbage she throws out for them. They finally all leave just after dark. It’s miserable no matter where we are in our house you can hear them constantly screaming. We gave up using our patio the bird crap in everywhere. Our cars get hit every time they are out of the garage. We can’t keep our windows or the sides of the house clean and now with the water restriction we can’t clean it up. I can’t let my GGS play outside its just to dirty. The bird crap is bad enough but we get all the garbage dropped everywhere. And to top it off the crows are pecking holes on the ridge of our very expensive new roof. We have had it fixed twice in the last 18 months. We have tried to talk to them it didn’t help much. She did say she would stop feeding the crows if we turned off our motion security light by the creek that evidently shines in her bedroom window. We turned off the light and she just fed the crows from the other side of her house so nothing changed. Needless to say the light went back on after a couple of months. I wanted to add more lights but DH wouldn’t do it. We had the forest service guy out and were told that he couldn’t do anything. We talked to an attorney and were told we could sue but it would probably be thrown out because the only damages we really had was the roof damage and our roofing guy didn’t charge us to fix it. We are retired and I would love to sleep past 4:30 we know we can’t sale because we would have to disclose the issue so we are thinking about buying another house out of state and will be spending summers there and maybe winter here when we can keep the windows closed and have a little peace and quiet.

Casey, I think that is no crow!! That is a magnificent RAVEN!! crows mostly have yellow straight bills ravens have black bills and a curve downward, some crows do have black bills however. Then there are black grackles I think they are which are neither crows or ravens but make a lot of noise lol. Beautiful picture, what ever it may be,may need to snatch that if you don't mind. But their voices and calls are very different. the sounds of Raven and Crow Fall is most definitely late according to that glorious tree! wow what a gorgeous show off it is! edit I think I am wrong! I thought most crows have yellow beaks but looking it up just now they don't. So I was wrong that is likely a crow darn it i wanted it to be a raven lol.