Butterfly Gardening Blog

Its been here for a few days now, but I’m just starting to feel it.

I saw a couple of butterflies today, a white and a sulfur – I couldn’t tell the species. At first I thought it was a Little sulfur (Eurema lisa) then realized it was too big. Couldn’t get any closer.

Daffodils and forsythias aren’t native to this region and have no benefit for butterflies but I still like them. They are so pretty this time of year:

A big thing I’m trying to figure out for this year is the puppy. We have our yard fenced in from her – but now my gardens aren’t safe! I’m afraid she will trample a caterpillar or break off some plant just as its coming up. I need to find some cheap way to enclose the garden area that doesn’t look bad.

We saw all sorts of other wildlife while at the Virgin Islands too: reptiles, birds. fish, turtles, etc.

We especially saw lots of iguanas! There were some at the resort we stayed at and we saw a lot at Coral World too.

There were some other lizards there too – I don’t know what species they are. I suspect the one is either the same as those you see in Florida everywhere or at least a similar species:

But then we saw this type too, at Coral World:

Also at Coral World we saw green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) and some Red-Footed Tortoises (Geochelone carbonaria). Red-Footed Tortoises were brought to the Virgin Islands hundreds of years ago from South America.

They also had lorikeets which are nectar-eating birds. I don’t think they are native to the Virgin Islands, but they were really pretty. You could buy little cups of nectar for them and they land all over you to feed!

At St. John we saw this really pretty hermit crab – it was really close to the road and we were afraid it would get ran over. We realized afterward that we had no idea which way it was trying to go so we put it back where we found it:

At Bolongo Bay Beach (where we stayed) we saw some cute little crabs early in the morning running in and out of little holes in the sand. I managed to get one to sit still long enough to get a good picture of it:

Altogether it was a very nice vacation! I hope to go again someday, do some more snorkeling and hopefully see more butterflies!

In addition to the butterflies, we were also lucky to see some other wildlife while visiting The Butterfly Farm at St. Thomas.

Down in a couple of the leaves – of I think the same plant that might be a skipper host plant – we found some tiny little frogs! I don’t how clear it is in this picture, you will probably need to click on it to see the bigger version:

We also saw this really cool spider:

One day at St. John we also saw a large spider – does anyone know – are these both orb weaver spiders?

There is a hummingbird species that is common on the Virgin Islands too. We saw quite a few of them around, but only once, at The Butterfly Farm, was I able to get a picture of one:

I don’t know if there are other hummingbird species on the Virgin Islands or not.

Next week – other reptiles, birds and more that we saw on the Virgin Islands!