We hope you enjoyed yesterday’s series showing the amazing journey of the Monarch Butterfly, from caterpillar to chrysalis to its majestic emergence. Mickey Raine and his wife, Elaine, took in more than two dozen caterpillars by request from local gardens, saving them from predatory conditions and overseeing the transformation at their home. Mickey’s thoughts on the experience follow, and then we’ll have some final photos later today.

From Mickey: Amazingly, even after years of field study and photography, while also reading about some of these things in books or seeing specials on television, it barely compares when you can actually see the incredible changes occurring right in front of your eyes, and it was as if we were learning something new.

Never did we expect to be educated to this level, for we never thought about these particular moments of transformation, but rather the final resulting forms after the various stage changes. Man is often too blinded in this idea that we are so much more advanced than our cohabitants, but human science can never duplicate what we saw.