Butterfly Gardening Blog

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!

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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?

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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)

I almost forgot to post that the hummingbirds are back again! I’m sure they’ve been back in this area for a while, but we hadn’t gotten our feeders out yet and hadn’t seen any. Well, we finally saw the first one on Friday. I wasn’t able to get any pictures of it – they are not real cooperative with photographers!

While mine is mostly a butterfly garden, hummingbirds like many of the same plants, so it is kind of a hummingbird garden too!

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I found a Black Swallowtail caterpillar on my Golden Alexanders!

My understanding had been that if any Swallowtail in this area were to use Golden Alexanders (Zizia aurea) it would be only the Woodland Swallowtail (Papilio joanae) – but others sources seem to doubt that P. joanae is really a separate species anyway. Up until now I never saw any caterpillars on the plants. I did for the first time recently see an adult looking as though she was interested in laying on them however, but I didn’t find any eggs.

Now, as I was trying to find a truly native host plant for Black Swallowtails, I bought a Yellow Pimpernel (Taenidia integerrima) plant last year for my garden. Earlier this spring I found an egg on it, and later a first instar larvae, which of course I would assume would be a Black Swallowtail (P. polyxenes). I didn’t really keep track of it to see how it was doing – but have been very excited to have found a native host plant for them that they will actually use!

Anyway, on Friday, I looked over at the Yellow Pimpernel plant, which incidently is right next to the Golden Alexanders, and saw two caterpillars on it! The larger of the two was towards the base of the plant and kind of hidden from view:

Then, I look up, and towards the top of the plant – on a stem that already had all its leaves eaten off I see another caterpillar! Only this one was in the process of molting. The first pictures I tried to take as it was actually molting were all out of focus. Apparently this camera had a hard time figuring out what to focus on and it doesn’t have a manual focus so there was nothing I could do. I eventually put my hand up behind the caterpillar and then it focused just perfectly! By that time it was done molting but it was still a cool picture – its head is still white and if you look closely you can see the dead skin behind it, mostly behind the stem it is on:

The whole thing left me wondering though – were the caterpillars on the Golden Alexanders P. polyxenes or joanae?

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

I just happened to be lucky enough to have the camera with me, get it aimed and in focus for the few seconds this skipper sat still on this flower! There still isn’t a whole lot of flowers blooming yet – I need to get more that bloom in April and May – but the Pin Cushion Flowers/Scabiosa are blooming really nicely now!

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My Baptisia australis is blooming! This is the first year mine has bloomed! The first one I had got eaten so badly by rabbits that it died. I think I got this one last year or the year before. Either way this is the first year it has ever bloomed! Hasn’t keep it from having Dusky Wings laying eggs all over though! There were eggs on it when I got it! (I don’t have separate information pages up yet about duskywings or Baptisia but I will eventually.) I had a difficult time getting the flowers in focus – I still have lot to learn with this digital camera!

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These two frogs (or toads, I don’t know which) were mating in one of our little ponds (same one as on May 4 and April 7). They were, uh, ‘involved’ for like over 24 hours!

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