A Butterfly in Solid Wood (with photos)

I will admit I have no clue where to put this, but I felt I had to post it somewhere. This happened to me today, November 5th.

I was splitting firewood, as I have been doing for the past few weeks as its getting colder here (North Eastern Saskatchewan, Canada). I split a few blocks as I always do, and on one block I noticed that a butterfly was in the center of the block of wood. A solid block ! No pockets of space, no bark it could have been in, no signs of it living there at all. But there it was stuck to the wood where I had just split it. I thought, hmm interesting, it almost looked like dry wood bark, i thought it was dead. I tapped the block of wood with the axe and the butterfly came to life. It was a living butterfly from a solid block of wood.

I still cannot explain how it managed to survive. First off I thought, OK, i imagined it was in the wood, it must have flown here and landed on the split wood. But if that's the case, I still want to know how it has survived the temperatures here. There is snow on the ground ! It was snowing when I found it ! Its been -5 celcius, with the wind, nights get down to -12 celcius.

Could the butterfly survive these sustained periods of cold? This is the only one I have seen by the way.

Anyways, I ran back to the house and grabbed my digital camera for some quick shots. My focus is bad, but you get the picture.








Now I have read threads on this very site about animals springing to life after coming out of solid objects and I always found it to be silly, but this really made me think.

Was it alive in the piece of wood?

Animals can squeeze themselves through amazingly small holes.

Maybe this species hibernates inside trees? Don't know if that's possible...

Cool pics

[edit on 11/5/2005 by djohnsto77]

No other comments? If someone could atleast identify the type of butterfly in the picture I could look into it further.

[edit on 5-11-2005 by Dulcimer]

Maybe you can find it on this list:

www.cbif.gc.ca...

Warning: There's a lot of them

edit:

After looking it looks like it might be a member of the Nymphalis genus, it looks kind of like it and according to the website, that's one of the few genera that spend the winter in Canada as adults.

This is Milbert's Tortoiseshell:



www.cbif.gc.ca...'sTortoiseshell_e.php



[edit on 11/5/2005 by djohnsto77]

Butterflies do really hibernate during the winter and by the photo you provided I can assume it is specimen in nymphalidae family they usually have lower side of the wings brown tree like.
It seems djhonsto already post it minute before me, but it is his opinion I agree a lot.

That really does look like it, except for this:

The hindwings have blue spots between the orange band and the irregular outer margin.

Are there any similar to this in apperance and nature without this part?

Otherwise its pretty much spot on.

It's a common type of nymph butterfly, and yes, they do seek shelter in tiny cracks when it gets cold or miserable outside.

What a NEAT story, though! I know there are butterfly house plans available but I kind of thought they were just, well, nonsense.

Apparently not!
butterflywebsite.com...

That is a really neat story, Dulcimer!

I wouldn't know what to think either, it'd be weird to see what you saw. Thanks for sharing the story!



Byrd, that Butterfly house plans link is great. I've never heard of those before.

That's an amazing (and really cool!) thing to happen. I had one of those butterfly houses (store bought) but none seemed to move it. This summer I planted some butteryfly attracting plants, buddleia, echinaceas, and liatris, and had many beautiful butterflies come around. That said, if I saw one come out of a log I was splitting, I sure would be surprised!!! Neat story!

That kind of makes sense that the log would have split where it would have a gap that the butterfly had crawled into. My guess is that the butterfly got into the log after it was on your woodpile, not while it was part of the tree. Since the grain of the wood runs parallel to the log, there could have been small fissures that run inside the log. When the logs dry they shrink and sometimes this causes the fissures. Still, I can imagine your surprise. Neat stuff!