I flutter and smile, seeing the dazzling butterfly|Essay by Nandini,9,Delhi

We are back with butterflies, this time  9 year old Nandini Maheshwari from  Delhi sharing her excitement with them.

Dont miss the accompanying cool facts, shared/ acknowledged by Subhadra Devi, bird photographer  turned birder, a nature  enthusiast and a member of the National Conservation Foundation (NCF), India.

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I flutter and smile with a sparkle,
And feel like flying when I see a dazzling butterfly.

Butterflies are totally awesome and mesmerizing creatures of nature. They also have colourful and transparent wings. They are harmless and gazing  at their beauty is so relaxing in itself. My favourite butterfly is Rainbow Monarch and blue butterfly because of its ravishing colors.

They have a four stage life cycle which goes like this –
A butterfly lays an egg,
A caterpillar comes out which is so so hungry . It eats leaves. If you offer, I think it would also eat fruits, vegetables, leaves, burgers, pizzas and cheese .Now it’s a fatso and turned into a cocoon. After 2 weeks, it comes out as the prettiest butterfly.

If I get to hold a butterfly , I will play with her with a gentle hand and release her into the sky to flutter, flutter, flutter….butterfly, keep soaring high!

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Cool Fact#1:  A whopping 75 percent of known insects, undergo metamorphosis.

Among them bees, beetles, flies, and moths—develop in four stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. Most striking about complete metamorphosis is how different the larva looks and behaves from the adult.

Other species, such as grasshoppers and dragonflies, experience incomplete, or simple, metamorphosis, which involves three life stages—egg, larva or nymph, and adult or imago. The nymphs look like tiny adults, eating and shedding their skins until they reach adulthood.

Read more at National Geographic  here

Cool Fact#2: A  Caterpillar has as many as 4,000 muscles in its body

By comparison, humans have just 650 muscles in a considerably larger body The caterpillar’s head capsule alone consists of 248 individual muscles. That’s one seriously muscle-bound insect!

Read more at ThoughtCo here