Rose Cochran-Teeter is known in Ithaca as the butterfly lady for a great reason! For the last 12 years, Rose has kept tanks inside her salon and helps nurture caterpillars into beautiful Monarch butterflies. The problem is that we’ve been using a lot of herbicides that have wiped out monarch caterpillars food, milkweed, and their numbers are going down. Rose takes care of the caterpillars and once they go through metamorphosis (which a lot of her clients get to witness), she even feeds the baby butterflies with little syringes of sugar water. Once the butterflies mature, Rose tags the butterflies and releases them in hopes that they are able to migrate to El Rosario, Mexico. This year Rose will be releasing over 300 butterflies!

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