Oh no! I think we’ve been raided by a raccoon? I don’t actually know for sure, but when I went to bed last night we had a good seven or eight mamba jambas, and this morning I could only find two. And no chrysalises, nor corpses.
Birds, wasps, spiders, frogs, and a variety of other creepy-crawlies all feast upon monarch caterpillars, and to be fair, I couldn’t find raccoon listed as a top predator. However, we have a lot of raccoons around our farm, and I’m pretty sure that the catastrophe happened during the night; prime raccoon hunting time. We still have a lot of the little teeny weenie caterpillars and medium-sized, so if the mamba jambas were indeed eaten, it seems like something choosy and sadistic plucked them off of the bushes.
It’s probably pretty obvious that we are not fans of raccoons on our farm. Our dog, a little rat terrier-mix, got gang-banged by two of them last year. Now to be fair, he probably put his nose where it didn’t belong, but those jerks almost killed him. No matter what he did, he didn’t deserve that.
I’m feeling bummed, but we’re going to take this as a learning experience and move forward. We still have a lot of caterpillars that look fat and healthy, so I’ve taken the two mamba jambas I could find and installed them in our old Painted Lady enclosures. Here’s hoping that we don’t start losing the medium-sized ones in the garden.
Copyright KEHC Photography, 2019
Simply Sunlight 
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