Seen Around

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (missing some wings on both sides)

Monarch

Pipevine Swallowtail (look at that blue in the sunlight!)

Variegated Fritillary?

Giant Swallowtail

This is a blurry shot of the same Giant Swallowtail in the photo above.  I chased this butterfly around the garden for several minutes because I wanted to get a good photo for identification.  It seemed to be very aware of my presence and eventually tired of me and left the yard.  Doesn't it look ghostly? 

Flurry

Good thing the bees, wasps, moths, humming birds, and butterflies don't mind that my butterfly garden is a complete mess.  This summer has been so hot and so dry that the basil is yellow and wilted.  A morning glory vine wraps around the rosemary, and Johnson grass reaches taller than the lantana and chive flowers.  The sunflower long ago fell sideways and dried up.  Weeds choke the overgrown oregano, but a couple of volunteer zinnias keep blooming brightly in their awkward places against the brick sidewalk.  

The yellow swallowtail caught my eye and lured me outside.  It fed and gracefully danced all morning.  I didn't realize that its wings were damaged until I went outside with my camera.  Then, I saw and heard all of the other buzzy things flitting in and out of the remaining flowers.  An anole crept up a sage stem and leaped to the cover of the lantana.  A dragonfly zoomed in and out of my hearing as I leaned in closer to look at some of the tiny butterflies no bigger than my fingernail. Bees of different sizes landed on flowers in my peripheral vision and directly  in front of me.  Ants crawled into the centers of the morning glories, and the underside wings of the painted ladies glittered in the high-noon sunlight.

So much activity in such a small place.   The light is starting to feel like September.

Christmas Visitors

After making so many bird ornaments in the last month (with more still to go), I decided to do some real birding since we no longer have outside cats. It's my first new year resolution.

On Christmas Eve, the children and I made 6 pine cone bird-feeders. Our dog longed for a spoonful of peanut butter, and the squirrels quickly discovered and devoured the leftover seeds on the sidewalk. They also managed to escape with three of the pine cones (I caught one red-handed as he ran off along the top of the fence). Three feeders are left in the remains of the butterfly bushes.

Using our new chalkboard place mats, I made a list of the birds and squirrels we've seen so far today. Bird book in hand, I'm hoping to get better at distinguishing sparrows.

Shhh. . . add a Towhee to the list. . .

Merry Christmas.

Owl Sighting

We were playing a family game of Harry Potter Clue last night when our neighbors rang the doorbell to tell us that an owl was on some lines outside of our house. It was a barred owl, and it let our neighbor shine a flashlight in its eyes and let me flash lights with my camera. Four adults and four children stood in the middle of the street in front of our house and looked up in amazement. The owl probably has a home in our neighborhood in a hollow tree or abandoned crow's nest. It may be responsible for the intestines our neighbor found in his yard a few days before. After about five minutes, it flew away across the street and out of view into some pine trees.

After doing a little research about the barred owl and downloading my photos, we returned to our game of Clue to rule out the owlery as the crime scene. The intersection of this feathered messenger with our Saturday night, however, was as bewitching as the world of wizards and magical creatures in our Harry Potter infused imaginations.

Wait-- a letter!

Courtesy of Charlie Deaton.

Giant Swallowtail

This Giant Swallowtail visited our backyard, butterfly habitat today. I spent an hour hunting down information on the internet to identify it. For a while, I thought it might be a Thoas Swallowtail, but its range is South America through Texas (only sometimes in Oklahoma and Kansas), so that didn't sound right. This set of photographs helped me correctly identify it as a Giant Swallowtail (I LOVE the internet). The difference is the number of spots on the trailing edge of the forewings. Thoas has 4 marginal spots on the trailing edge of the forewing; whereas the Giant has only 3.

Can you count the spots on the separated wings in the enlarged photo below? You can also see some damage to its left forewing.

This butterfly did not want me too close. In fact, it flew away over the fence twice while I was trying to photograph it. If I had not been able to zoom in on my photos, I probably could not have identified it. I hope it returns this afternoon. We see Eastern Tiger Swallowtails in our back yard every so often, but this is the first Giant Swallowtail.

Sleeping Bees

One evening last week, I went outside to gather some flowers from our overgrown, butterfly garden to bring inside. We had not had rain in a while along with record breaking high temperatures, and the plants were showing their weariness. I wanted to save a few before they all dried up. (Thankfully, we now have some cooler temperatures to give us a hint of autumn).

Did you know that bumblebees sleep on flowers during the night-- like little black and golden fairies? I counted and photographed at least 11 bees that I could see around the perimeter of the garden. I turned to the computer to do some research and discovered that male bumblebees indeed sleep on flowers -- especially late in the season when the temperatures begin to drop at night and when female bees refuse to let them back into their underground nests. Apparently, they are no longer needed for making baby bumblebees. Poor things. They attach themselves to flowers and hang out all night until the sun shines on their backs to warm them up for another day of pollen gathering. In our garden they preferred the lantana, flowering basil, and butterfly bush flowers for beds.

How could I live for almost 42 years and not know this?

Once inside, the bunch of flowers (lantana, zinnias, and some mysterious plant that the nursery told me was milkweed but that I have doubts about) quickly became the center of attention for curious cats. They smelled, rubbed, and chewed on the flowers until I moved the mason jar vase to higher ground. Those cats!

Loving Butterflies

Silver-spotted Skipper(Epargyreus clarus)

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus)

Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta) --orange and black on the
center purple butterfly bush flowers

Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes)

All four of these photos were taken on Monday afternoon when our butterfly garden was buzzing with bees, wasps, and butterflies. At one point, all 4 butterflies were in the same frame of my camera, but the photo didn't come out well. I hope I have identified these correctly. I'm least sure about the Red Admiral, but this photo isn't as close. I used this site to help me discover the names of these creatures.

Because monarchs and swallowtails are so large and beautiful, it is tempting to take all of my photos of them. I'm trying to branch out, however, and see how many different kind of butterflies I can find in my little patch of flowers for the rest of the summer. Late afternoon, if a thunderstorm isn't blowing over, is the best time for butterfly activity.

Do you have a butterfly garden? What are you seeing in yours?

More Loving

: : my son reading in the morning in our maple tree

: : a blur of blue and black wings on Harlequin Glorybower flowers

: : a small, heirloom tomato raised from seedlings shared by a fellow teacher at the end of the school year

: : this newly bloomed, golden zinnia

Loving

: : these zinnias outside of my kitchen window

: : the places my cats sleep

: : block printing with 10/11 year-olds


: : sewing with friends young and wise

Good times of the summer.