The Apples in My Orchard

Since the Weekly Word Press Photo Challenge has been discontinued, I have been surfing around the blogosphere for other photo challenges in which I can regularly participate. Dutch Goes the Photo is a blog that hosts a variety of photographic challenges, so tonight I turned to their page to see that the photo challenge for the last week was to interprete  the word “new.”

This was the perfect word for what I photographed earlier this week, a monarch caterpillar coming out of its eggshell and eating its first meal (the eggshell). Although I’ve known this is what they do before gorging themselves on milkweed for the next two weeks of this life cycle stage,  capturing a photo of it has been difficult. However, my timing was just right the other day. After photographing the egg daily since finding  it on the requisite milkweed leaf, I noted that the egg began to look different and figured the time would be soon that we (hopefully) would have a caterpillar emerge.

Another blogger, The Mindful Gardener,  who has fantastic garden photographs, and stories about her garden plants, recently purchased a macro lens. I couldn’t help but be jealous of that lens when trying to capture a decent photo of this event. A brand new monarch caterpillar eating its first meal is my interpretation of the word NEW for the Dutch Goes the Photo Challenge!  I cannot imagine something “newer” than a new life or a new life stage, as is the case with this new caterpillar. Raising Monarchs breaths new life into each summer for me, as I am always amazed at the process!

Just to show the difference, here is the same caterpillar today, June 24th, 2018. He’s got his NEW stripes now! The picture above and below contain one and the same caterpillar! NEW – it can be amazing!