Hello!! So, you've stumbled upon my butterfly page! I apologize for my long absence; with the acquisition of the Weebly app and a wifi card in my camera (so I can update from the field), I hope to be picking back up where I left off and cataloging the species that visit our area. In the next few days, I hope to add a calendar to this site so that I can track when we first sight various species each year. Feel free to drop me a comment if you have any suggestions!!
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This summer, after seeing a stand of milkweed alongside a back road that had just been mowed, I decided to stop and look for caterpillars on the dying weeds. I found a few and brought them home, thus beginning my first foray into raising Monarchs. So far, we've raised and released four females and three males, with several more caterpillars and chrysalids yet to go. It turns out that I am absolutely terrible at spotting eggs, though; nearly every time I bring in new milkweed for the enclosure, even after I rinse it to remove OE spores, I end up with a brand new little caterpillar in a few days. It certainly has been a learning experience! After releasing the latest hatch, I visited the "butterfly patch" in my pasture; there's an area of about an acre that we don't mow, and it's chock-full of Joe Pye Weed, Ironweed, Mountain Mint, and what seems like virtually every flower known to man. The butterflies seem to love it; I counted 6 Monarchs, 3 Tigers, a Buckeye, and various other Swallowtails that I have yet to compare photograph-to-book to identify properly. I will have to post those soon! Here's hoping for good weather this weekend, so I can get out there in the early afternoon when they'll be most active! Here are just a few of the photos I've gotten during the process. I believe that next year, I'll be ordering a tagging kit so I can keep track of how many stay around. Took a drive through the refuge this evening and finally found a few flutterers. I'm not entirely sure on that second Comma, considering the ID is being made from the underside of the wing (the sunlight made the wings semi-translucent).
The following are some sightings from the previous few months. I started this site last year when I was first introduced to the staggering amount of butterflies both here on my farm and in the nearby Patoka River National Wildlife Refuge, but haven't been able to keep it up much. I hope to rectify that, starting now...partially because this has been a strange year so far. I wish I would have kept better track of sighting dates last year, because it seems like we're way behind this year. I'm not sure if it was the rough winter we had or if there's some other reason, but we've just not had the amount of butterflies we had last year. My butterfly bushes died all the way back over the winter and are just now starting to bloom, but I've got tons of coneflowers and other butterfly-attracting blooms in my beds, and visitors are few and far between this year. So I will use this blog to log and tag sightings to check next year.
Last year, we had hundreds of the various morphs of Tiger Swallowtails; this year, I've only seen one. I haven't seen a single Clearwing, either. We're way early on Monarchs though; I've been seeing them for months now, all over the place. I've seen a couple Red-Spotted Purples, a single Red Admiral, a couple Great Spangled Fritillaries, a Pipevine Swallowtail, and a few of the Cabbage Whites and various Sulphurs. I've only seen a handful of Viceroys, too, and they were absolutely everywhere last year. On the other hand, I do believe I've seen a Zebra Swallowtail in the refuge twice now; I just haven't been able to get a photo to positively identify it (fingers crossed!). So here starts my sighting log. |
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