This costume designer built a prosthetic wing for her butterfly
She was able to watch it fly away
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Allison Klein.
Romy McCloskey is a costume designer by training, with a specialty in intricate bead work that demands precision. She also raises and releases monarch butterflies at her Texas home.
These two skills intersected on a recent day when she performed surgery on one of her injured monarch’s wings, an operation that saved its life and allowed it to fly away to migrate.
A few weeks ago, McCloskey was at her home in suburban Houston and looked over at her cocoons, only to see her house cat Floki swatting at them.
“It had a crack in the cocoon,” McClosky said. “I thought, “please don’t let it die.”
A few days later, a butterfly from the cracked cocoon came out with a mangled wing and was unable to fly.
Monarchs are renowned for their annual journey, often thousands of miles, to Mexico, and for their multi-generational trip back to the northern United States and Canada.
The mangled wing would make the journey impossible for this butterfly.
She put a picture of the broken wing on Facebook, and a friend sent her a step-by-step tutorial video that showed how to fix it.
“Because of the work I do, it was no-brainer,” said McCloskey.
She took out the tools she needed: tweezers, small scissors, glue, a wire hanger, a towel and talcum powder. She also had a spare wing from a butterfly that had died days earlier.
The whole thing took 10 minutes.
“You have to be sure the donor wing you have fits,” she said. “It overlaps by less than a millimeter, and I used the tiniest bit of glue. It is such a scant amount of glue.”
She put the butterfly back in its cage with some food and left it overnight.
“I woke up the next morning and said, ‘Please be alive,’” she said.
She saw it moving, and knew the surgery was a success.
She went into her garden and released her other eight butterflies. Then she looked at the one with the prosthetic wing.
“He climbed on my finger, checked out the surroundings and then took off,” she said. “He landed on some bushes, and sure enough, when I went to reach for him, he flew up in the direction of the sun.”
And that was the last she saw of him.
