It’s National Learn About Butterflies Day.

A lot of what you can learn about butterflies these days isn’t very happy news, with many species declining because they’re losing their habitat.

But here’s the story of a guy who turned his backyard into a habitat for one type of butterfly, and it worked out really well.

Tim Wong is a biologist in California; he’s worked with all kinds of creatures both on land and in water.

But he’s got a special connection with butterflies; as a kid, he grew up near grasslands where they were common, and he’d watch them, catch them and study them.

He learned how to raise butterflies in elementary school and never really looked back.

But Wong didn’t want to just indulge himself around the butterflies; he wanted to help them thrive, at a time when the dice aren’t exactly rolling their way.

He focused on one very rare species called the California pipevine swallowtail butterfly, because it only feeds from a similarly rare plant called the California pipeline.

Wong built a butterfly enclosure in his backyard.

He collected close to two dozen of the species’ caterpillas from grasslands in the Bay Area.

And he got clippings of the plant from the San Francisco Botanical Garden.

Then, he watched the life cycle take off: a caterpillar creates its chrysalis, hibernates, emerges as a butterfly, then finds a mate and puts eggs on pipevine plants to hatch more caterpillars.

There were so many caterpillars popping up in Wong’s enclosure, in fact, that he started bringing them back to the botanical garden, where their numbers started to grow.

A butterfly that was next to impossible to find in San Francisco was now on the rise.

And while Wong says not everyone has the time, resources and expertise to do what he’s done, lots of us can help restore native plants where we live to give our local butterfly populations a little more room to grow.

Today is also National Save a Spider Day.

The community of Avoca, Iowa has saved a spider of a sort: it’s actually a 10 foot tall sculpture of a spider, with eight tall legs connected to an arachnid body made out of the chassis of an old Volkswagen Beetle.

So it’s kind of a beetle and kind of a spider.

How one man repopulated a rare butterfly species in his backyard (Vox)

VOLKSWAGEN BEETLE SPIDER (Olio in Iowa)

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Photo by CALChux via Flickr/Creative Commons