Making friends

It’s been five weeks since Alexa said hello to “Tipsy,” the butterfly at Dorflinger Days, a gala public fair hosted by the Dorflinger Wildlife Sanctuary on September 10.

At my own exhibit table I was introducing children to Tipsy, a crippled monarch, when a young girl, after helping me to feed him, set him traipsing across her fingers and arms, to delighted giggles.

As Alexa later wrote, “Ed asked the little girl if she wanted to help [and] she said ‘ow boy would I’… An hour later Ed asked the little girl if she wanted to take Tipsy and a chrysalis home. Again she said ‘ow boy would I.’”

“Tipsy keeps flapping his wings really fast and I do not know what to do,” Alexa e-mailed on September 11. “If you know what to do write back soon.”

And later that day: “Sorry to bother you again, but how can you tell when a butterfly is sleeping?”

On September 19, in an 8:19 a.m. e-mail, Alexa reported the hatching of “Special,” her first reared monarch. “Gess what? I was getting ready for school. And it was not even the right color [to hatch]. So I went into my mom’s room to do my hair. And when I came back there it was… And I named it Special because I think it was special that it hatched before I went to school.”