Lots of butterflies

I've never been particularly fond of zinnias, but maybe I just didn't know them very well. The large garden zinnias, planted in the Peter Rabbit Garden by a colleague, are butterfly magnets. The zinnias reseeded happily from last year, and right now it's a wonderful butterfly pitstop.

Maybe because of our drought, nectar sources are literally drying up, so only minimally watered garden flowers are a respite.But the butterflies were abundant - mostly tiger, black, and pipevine swallowtails, with an odd silver-spotted skipper, gulf fritillary, and a single monarch dropping by.

Pipevine swallowtail

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Garden butterflies

I've seen lots of butterflies in our garden recently. Most are familiar visitors, and always welcome. But I've needed to remind myself recently of the differences between two of the 'regulars' -- tiger and black swallowtails. They belong to a mimicry group of butterflies that mimic pipevine swallowtails.

Male tiger swallowtail

Male tiger swallowtails are yellow with black stripes, but females are either yellow, with blue on the hindwing, or dark, also with blue spots on the hindwing.

It's telling the dark females apart from some of the other dark swallowtails that's harder. Hmm, I see from my Kaufman guide that there's a good bit of variation in the tiger female's dark morph, just to complicate things. But distinguishing black swallowtails to dark tiger females is easy if you get a good look at the lower side of the wing and how it's banded with orange, and then get a good look at the upper wings (easier said than done).

Check out a wonderful butterfly site that I just found at the Massachusetts Butterfly Club, a chapter North American Butterfly Association -- it has a wonderfully useful side-by-side comparison feature, with LOTS of images of each species. Wow. That one is being bookmarked!

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Butterflies and caterpillars

I've been watching tiger swallowtails do their spiral courtship dance near the phlox this morning. The black one is the female, the yellow the male. She'll lay her eggs on all sorts of host plants -- tulip poplar, ash, and black cherry, among others. It's great to see some butterflies now after such a poor season to date. The April freeze followed by drought must have really taken its toll on butterflies, since they've been conspicuously absent up until now.

One of my first forays into gardening as an adult was gardening for butterflies. In spite of being a biologist, I had no idea of what caterpillars or butterflies ate, not much about their life cycles, and certainly little about their feeding preferences. My fellow students did pollination projects, and my best friend reared caterpillars in plastic bags as part of her research, but I was oblivious to the nuances.

But, starting to learn about butterflies, their host plants, and caterpillars was fascinating, and I quickly became hooked. Expanding my attention to all sorts of garden insects, birds, and other wildlife was the next step and has been wonderful fun.

Only just now am I starting to see the striped caterpillars of black swallowtail butterflies, here munching on a fennel flower in the vegetable garden.

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