Butterfly Gardening Blog

It’s been warm and mostly dry the past couple of days now – so plants are starting to grow again! I will get pictures of what is blooming now real soon. I’ll get pictures of the caterpillars I’m raising now too – they might be big enough to get them with the digital camera now even.

Meanwhile – look at this: Friday Sprog Blogging: lepidoptery – one of Janet Stemwedel/Dr. Free-Ride kids is interested in growing carrots to feed caterpillars and wants to study them! If I ever have kids, gosh I hope they are interested in butterfly gardening too!

Altogether I’ve now collected 4 eggs from the butterfly that laid some on May 7th. Three of them have hatched. Two on Monday and one today. I suspect the last will hatch either tonight or tomorrow morning.

It’s been really cold and rainy here for like a week or so, so I don’t have much gardening stuff to write about. No new pictures either – too wet and nasty out to take any.

These last two eggs I brought in from outside more recently, that is why they are hatching later – since its been so cold outside they were developing slower.

As soon as I get more pictures of something worth seeing, I’ll post them.

Following up on my post from May 7th about the Question Mark or Comma eggs: before I left for my mom’s I cut off two leaves which each had an egg on it – just in case they hatched before I got back. Well, on Monday those two hatched (after I was back home!)! One leaf was from the hops vine, the other the pipevine. Anyway, those two little guys (or girls) are doing just fine! I was concerned about getting them the leaf they were on quickly. The hops leaf was starting to dry up a bit, and of course pipevine is the wrong host plant and likely the caterpillar would have died if it had eaten any of it. I had to use a paintbrush to move one of them, but had no problems with it.

And no, I don’t have a picture of them. As mentioned before, my digital camera doesn’t have a good enough macro function to get a picture. I will have to take one with the film camera. I’ll post the pictures when I get them back.

Another detail worth mentioning – I said before that the eggs were laid on top of the leaves although I had read they lay them on the underside. Well, both of the eggs I could find that were laid on the hops leaves were on the top, but the two I found on the pipevine were actually laid on the underside of the leaf.

Oh – and one other thing – both caterpillars crawled over to the underside of the leaf right away to feed, and stayed there. One of the things that really fascinates me about these guys is how their is sometimes very predictable and obviously programmed into their genes. That fascinates me! Exactly how is behavior like that programmed into their genes and expressed like that?

While I was away visiting my mom, the baby robins all flew away! I didn’t even get a last chance to get another picture of them! I was hoping to see them when they were first learning to fly too!

Earlier posts and pictures about the robins are here:

May 7 – The robins had their babies!
April 26 – Some baby Robins are on the way!

-updated: I forgot to add that we still have plenty of meal worms left over – anybody hungry?

I’ve been posting a awful lot about wildlife other than butterflies around our yard! Its still far from the peak season for butterflies around here – and all the other critters seem to be everywhere now.

I was quite excited however this Sunday when I saw what was either a Question Mark or Comma flying around the garden. I could tell right away it was female as she was landing briefly on various plants trying to find the right one to lay eggs on – and then she flew over to my hops vine!

We’ve had lots of Question Marks and Commas around here the past few years, but this was the first time I’d ever seen one looking like they were going to lay eggs.

I went and got a camera and luckily she was still around when I got back! I couldn’t get her to sit still for a picture and eventually started looking over the hops to see if I could find any egss. I couldn’t see one anywhere – then all of a sudden she comes flittering by and lays an egg right on top of a leaf just a few inches in front of me!

Of course, I couldn’t get the camera ready in time!

I did watch her lay some more eggs though too. I saw her lay one on a pipevine leaf, which is pretty odd. Pipevine should be toxic to any butterfly except Pipevine Swallowtails. The vine is growing right next to the hops – could that have confused her?

And according to James Scott (‘The Butterflies of North America’ 1986) both Question Marks and Commas lay their eggs on the underside of the leaves, the ones I found on the hops were all on the tops of the leaves. I know she laid some more on the higher parts of the vine too though, but I can’t get up that far to find them – perhaps some of those are on the undersides of the leaves. Apparently they sometimes lay them stacked in piles, but all I saw was singly laid eggs. I will have to check the plant again more closely.

At any rate she never did sit still enough for me to even be able to tell which she was – a Question Mark or a Comma. And the eggs are too small for me to be able to photograph with the digital camera we have. I took some pictures of them with a film camera though, so it will be a while before I get them back.

I did get one quick picture of her from a distance though – its too hard, for me anyway, to make out what species she is:

(Technorati Tags: butterfly, butterflies, eggs, hops, Question Mark, comma)

I posted earlier about some of the caterpillars I had seen on my Golden Alexanders and how I was curious about which species exactly they were.

Here are a couple other pictures – two different caterpillars, both eating Golden Alexander leaves:

The thing is, the bigger one that had been on the Yellow Pimpernel a couple days before seems to have moved over to the Golden Alexanders. I can’t be certain it was the same one though of course. But the large one was gone and suddenly a second large one appeared on the other plant that I hadn’t noticed before.

So are they Papilio polyxenes or joanae? I have not actually seen eggs on the Golden Alexanders yet, but did see an adult behaving as though she might ovi-deposit (sp?) there. Would only P. jonae lay eggs on Golden Alexanders? Or might P. polyxenes do it too? Or maybe all were laid on the Yellow Pimpernel and moved over to the Golden Alexanders? But why would P. polyxenes be interested in Golden Alexanders? Any insight into this would be appreciated.

(Technorati Tags: butterfly, caterpillar, Black Swallowtail, Papilio joanae, Papilio polyxenes, Taenidia integerrima,)

We finally saw the baby birds in the robins nest I metioned a few days ago!

They are very protective parents – if we even walk over near the nest one of them fly over and start yelling at us!

Here’s one picture where you can just make out two beaks sticking out from the top:

Here’s another with one of the parents in the nest and one baby:

We bought some meal worms from a Wildbird Center and have been sitting them out near the nest – they come up right away and get the meal worms and feed them to their babies!

Here is a picture of the mealworms, in case you are curious about what they look like. It makes a nice contrast to the cute baby bird pictures too!

(Technorati Tags: bird, robin, nest, baby bird, mealworm. )

In one of our half barrel ponds (the one on the left in this picture) we have lots of tadpoles. I’m not sure how well they show up in this picture, but hopefully well enough that you can tell what you are looking at:

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Every year there are snakes that rest on the rocks on top of the retaining wall behind our house, by the creek. We are pretty certain that they are either Diamondback or Northern water snakes and so are not poisonous. Still, they sometimes come up in our yard and eat the fish in the ponds and also get a bit territorial and aggressive at times, so I’m not too thrilled with seeing them. At any rate I got the following picture of one recently. It seems a little lighter in color and I’m wondering if that is just because the time of the year, getting ready to molt or something like that?

(Technorati Tags: snake)

Guess what! We found lots more eggs in the pond – the same that had the other egg in it. These ones were presumable from these two.

At any rate they must be a different species because the eggs and the way they were laid were very different. There are tons of them this time. They are in these long, string like things that are wrapping all around the plants in the pond. Any one know what species these might be?

Here is a picture from above showing all the eggs that could be seen – I only wish I could post a really high resolution picture on here so you could really see all the detail, but it would just take too long to load:

Here I took a close up picture of just the eggs in the bottom right – I really like the photograph. Again, I wish I could post a higher resolution image:

(Technorati Tags: frog, toad, eggs, pond)