Is it a miracle? Winnipeg resident found a butterfly in his garage on a cold January day.
On Sunday a family from Winnipeg did not believe their eyes: a live butterfly hid from the cold in the garage. Now they sheltered it at their home.
"It can't do anything but put a smile on your face, you know, to just see something so beautiful like that when you're not expecting it," said John Watson, who made such an unusual discovery on Sunday.
"I look on the ground and there's a butterfly and it was the weirdest thing," Watson added. "At first I thought it was certainly not alive, and I crouched down and boom it started fluttering."
The air temperature in the city reaches -30 C and the man turned on the heating in his garage to work a little. After a while, he noticed a butterfly. Probably, the butterfly spent the whole winter in the garage, and just woke up ahead of time, when it became warm there. It was nicknamed Frostbite Bill.
An instructor in the entomology department at the University of Manitoba, Jordan Bannerman, explained that this type of butterfly is quite common in the province, and most often it can be found near the human habitat. However, it is impossible to meet a live butterfly in the winter.
"It's unusual, but if you understand their basic lifecycle it's not out of the question," Bannerman explained. "What likely happened in this case is that caterpillar wandered off its plant and ended up pupating inside the garage and then had a nice cozy place to continue developing."
The man also said that the family is doing the right thing providing soft fruit to the butterfly for eating. Unfortunately, Frostbite Bill most likely will not be able to meet spring and to fly outside since the life expectancy of this species of butterfly is not so long.
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