Yesterday afternoon I decided to rake and water the front lawn while the kids were napping. Throwing on a pair of old tennis shoes and hoisting a large rake under one arm, I was just stepping from our long driveway toward the browning lawn when I noticed something moving on the ground within my line of sight.
"What's that?"
I bent down closer to see a creature writhing and withering at the same time - a truly tragic sight... especially when I realized that it had been a very pretty butterfly whose wings were badly injured. Its left wing lay listless yet beautifully formed - but the right was cruelly torn and mangled. The shreds of what remained were drying and curling up.
Sad to watch, the butterfly - whose delicate arms and legs still worked perfectly - was trying desperately to unfurl the broken, battered wing. It hopped and hopped, falling over again and again due to the disproportionate weight of the good wing.
It didn't take much for me to know with a very heavy heart that this creature would never fly again. As far as I know, even with our most advanced modern technology, there is no surgery to repair the wing of a butterfly.
I had never been so close to one of these elegant creatures before. Setting down my rake gently at the side of the lawn, I sat with the butterfly and watched it for a while - noticing how papery and dehydrated its body looked as it tried to flap its wings and ended up falling over on its back again and again.
I'd been observing the little creature for a while when my husband came through on his bicycle and stopped next to me.
"What are you doing, hon?"
"This poor butterfly is injured."
"Oh yeah? I wonder if that's the same one the kids and I saw yesterday. I think the crows that live in that tree are going after them."
"Wow, you mean this little guy has been here trying to fly since yesterday?"
"Yeah, it looks like the same one. It's sad. It's not going to make it, hon."
"I know."
"So you're just sitting with it?"
"Well, it may be dying but it doesn't have to die alone."
My husband smiled. "That's really sweet." He left for his bike ride, leaving me with the creature.
As I sat there meditating on its fate and how beautiful it must have been while flying, I got the strongest impression that the little creature might be thirsty or hungry.
"Just because you've suffered a mortal injury doesn't mean you can't enjoy food," I thought - and walked into our kitchen. I got a dipperful of water, some syrup and some applesauce. "I think butterflies eat sweet things..."
Yet when I brought the little plate of food outside, I realized that it was much too large for a wounded butterfly to reach and that there was no way the creature would be able to hop that high. Looking around, I found a few small leaves with upturned edges and filled three of them with different substances which I placed near the butterfly.
One leaf held syrup, another applesauce, the last water.
The butterfly watched them closely but stayed where it was. I decided to give it some breathing room and went to rake.
When I returned ten minutes later, I lay down on the cement and sent it thoughts of love.
Then, suddenly, it began to hop! The little creature hopped and rolled all the way to the leaf full of water. I watched breathlessly as it proceeded to unfurl its long slender proboscis and suck up a large amount of the water in the leaf.
"Oh wow! You WERE thirsty!"
"I really don't think this poor thing is ready to die. I'm going to try to get it out of the driveway without hurting it."
When I was a kid I read that butterfly wings are made up of countless tiny feathers and that even the gentlest touch of a human finger could grievously injure the insect. With this understanding, I knew I could not try to lift the butterfly without giving it greater injury and perhaps killing it.
So, I searched for a twig and ended up settling for a long thick stem of Bermuda grass.
"Here," I whispered. "If you will jump onto this grass, I will lift you out of the path of danger." I sent it thought pictures with my head of jumping onto the grass.
To my total shock, the butterfly - despite its bum wing - jumped immediately onto the green stem I extended toward it.
"Oh WOW!"
Lifting it gently into a glass dish, I surrounded it with the leaves of food and water and then placed the dish out of the path to the side of the driveway, under a tree.
"Do you want to be outside for your final hours? Do you want to be under this tree?" I asked the butterfly. "Where do butterflies like to sleep?"
I left and re-entered my house, to google butterfly habitats.
Soon I'd returned to the glass pan, now prepared with a better understanding of butterflies.
"I guess you need to be warm, especially at night. And you can live in a house and be fed with sugar water. The article I googled said that your normal life span is very short and that you are typically done in by a wide variety of predators in nature.
So, I'm moving you into the house where you'll be warm, because we've had really cold nights lately. And you'll make a perfect morsel for a bird or spider if you stay here under this tree, without the capacity to fly away."
The butterfly hopped a little. I gently carried the glass dish into our home - filled with leaves, grass, dirt and some sugar water - and placed it up high.
All throughout last night, I checked on it every so often. The poor thing seemed so tired, I mistook it for dead at least three times. However when I blew on it gently, it would rouse and hop again. I also found it drinking more water once, and finally I realized that it was trying to sleep.
'Well of course you are... any wounded creature would wish for water and rest to heal. I hope you're feeling better, my friend."
This morning when I awakened, the butterfly had moved a few inches away to a different part of the pan and it had actually sort of unfurled the good wing. The hurt wing is completely shriveled though, never to return.
I haven't made a big deal about this butterfly to my children, not wanting our two year old to hurt it further. It is living on the mantle above our fireplace where our little girl can not reach or see it. Our five year old son knows that it is up there, and he shook his head and told me very philosophically, "Butterflies are on the food chain of the birds, Mom. That's what must have happened to it." He's just finished a unit on butterflies at school, so I take his word as fact.
A lot of people might think I'm crazy for trying to give relief to an insect, even a butterfly. I'm sure they'd call me a bleeding heart, and laugh at the notion of comforting a bug.
I've always believed though that all life has value - ALL life. This butterfly may have a very small and wounded body, but who can say whether it has a soul. Who can truly say whether it has emotions? It is a very real being right now, and one that has clearly weathered a painful attack.
If I can give it a little peace and ease in its last hours on this Bird-Eat-Butterfly type of planet, I feel lucky to do so.
Who can really know what the larger ramifications might be from taking care of this small creature? When I was fourteen or so, we read the book "Chaos" in my high school Humanities class. It described something called the butterfly effect.
"In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions; where a small change at one place in a nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state. For example, the presence or absence of a butterfly flapping its wings could lead to creation or absence of a hurricane."(Wikipedia)
Perhaps the nurturing of a dying butterfly may lead to the presence or creation of something beautiful in our world. At the very least, I'm comforted knowing that it has eaten and rested before beginning its final journey.
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