Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Friday, July 03, 2009
Butterflies and Associates
A mostly-pictures post with all of last Friday's butterfly photos. With any luck I can repeat the exercise today. Butterflies are fluttering and dragonflies are zipping and hovering all over the garden and meadow at this time of year. I find dragonflies to be much harder to photograph than butterflies.
You've already seen the Great Spangled Fritillary, but this is a different shot.
I created a Flickr account several months ago and have been posting photos there as well as to Picasaweb. The photo above is posted at Flickr.
This American Lady butterfly was nectaring on Spotted Knapweed too, but then flew off to rest in a Juniper tree.
Two different kinds of Oregano are in bloom and both are very popular with the butterflies and bees. This is an Orange Sulphur on the purple/pink flowered Oregano. I think the botanical name is Origanum vulgare, but Oregano taxonomy is confusing at best.
Here's a Cabbage White on the same Oregano. A very common butterfly, probably the most common butterfly in my garden, but check out the bee about to come in for a landing.
On the white-flowered Oregano, I found a Gray Hairstreak...
...which seems to be the same individual I photographed earlier in the meadow. Notice the same notch out of one wing.
Now we come to the Skippers. They still drive me to despair trying to identify them. Any idea which one this is?
These two, I believe, are Least Skippers. There should be more of them around for future study.
OK, that's it for the butterflies. Now we have the associates. 2007 was the first summer I planted lots and lots of Verbena bonariensis. Suddenly, it became easy to photograph clearwing moths because they just can't get enough Verbena nectar. They're so attracted to it that they let me get very close with the camera. This is a Snowberry Clearwing Moth.
And, lastly, a new-to-me dragonfly. This - a Banded Pennant - is small compared to some of the helicopter-sized ones I haven't yet been able to photograph.
Labels: butterflies, dragonflies, insects, moths
Saturday, August 02, 2008
Wild Things
Some wild things I photographed this afternoon. This is almost a pictures-only post, except for one question. Do you recognize the plant in the first photo? I'm stumped.
Labels: butterflies, dragonflies, insects, rhexia, wildflowers
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Meadow Flowers and Butterflies
There are butterflies everywhere! It's like somebody somewhere flipped the butterfly switch to "on".
Big charismatic butterflies, like this Pipevine Spicebush Swallowtail.
Small common butterflies, like this Cabbage White. They seem especially attracted to the lavender flowers. I'm glad I'm not growing broccoli.
Fabulously patterned butterflies, like this American Lady.
Irritatingly distant butterflies, like this Great Spangled Fritillary which remained deep in the meadow.
The meadow has turned white with ox-eye daisies, yarrow and fleabane, and dozens of cabbage white butterflies fluttering along above it all. Vetch contributes a dash of blue.
I was ready to condemn all these pretty flowers as weedy non-natives to be despised, but it isn't so. The yarrow (Achillea) is probably native, according to John Eastman in The Book of Field and Roadside, although there are European imports of the same species (?, that part is not clear to me) and the natives have been mingling with the foreigners and hybridizing without the help of human plant breeders. The great American melting pot. And the fleabanes (Erigeron), "have gone to Europe, usually as garden plants, adding to the roadside weed flora there - and reminding us that alien plant traffic travels both ways".
Even though the yarrow and fleabane may be native, they fall into the category of plants that spread fast through abandoned fields and are therefore generally regarded as weeds. I still like them. But not all my meadow plants are greedy territory-grabbers. Here's one I overlooked last year, probably because it's at the edge of the woods behind some tall grass, and yes, that appears to be a yarrow stem lying crosswise through the photo. Whorled Loosestrife (Lysimachia quadrifolia), with its pretty foliage and delicate yellow flowers, looks like it would be at home in any tasteful garden.
Other winged creatures of note besides the butterflies:
A mockingbird was singing to me all morning long yesterday. Good thing he knows more than one song.
I saw a scarlet tanager in gorgeous summer plumage. The color is breathtaking. Puts cardinals to shame. I don't have a picture, but All About Birds does.
Bluebirds have been eating red blueberries. They don't look ripe to me, but I'm not a bluebird. These are wild blueberries, BTW.
I saw a stunning dragonfly with wings of shimmering gold and I didn't have the camera with me, darn it. Maybe it'll come back.
Labels: birds, butterflies, dragonflies, wildflowers
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
CeVa Journal: Wildlife
Wild turkey and wood thrush. Whatever next? I was hoping to see new birds at the country house, but somehow wild turkeys didn't cross my mind. Two weekends ago, I saw this turkey hen amble through the woods in back. It is a hen, isn't it? Hard to tell from the crummy picture, but that's the best one I got.
Last weekend, something similar caught my eye, but this time I had the good sense to grab the binoculars instead of the camera. It was a tom turkey with red head and wattles and that strange beard thing sticking out from its chest. He scuffled through the leaves a while and moved on.
This morning, I heard a beautiful, distinctive bird song and tracked it through the woods to the singer. A wood thrush! It let me look and listen for a long while before it figured out I was following it around, and then flew away. It was back in a short time, but I didn't go chasing it again.
Yesterday, while hunting for wildflowers in the woods, I came across this tiny iridescent spider in the middle of its pollen-spangled web.
We started seeing dragonflies over the weekend. This one posed on the deck railing yesterday afternoon. I'm only just beginning to learn about dragonflies, and this one doesn't look like any of the pictures in my book. Maybe it's a damselfly instead?
Update, 4/25 5:30 pm EDT: Thanks to a comment from Annie in Austin, I think I've ID'd the dragonfly. She sent me here, and I clicked through to here, and said "Hmmm, that top picture looks quite a lot like my photo." My field guide only showed the Common Whitetail adult male, and that's what confused me. To be fair, if I had read the text in the guide instead of just looking at the pictures, I would have learned that the Common Whitetail juvenile male has a different abdomen coloration. And they're even more confusing when they go through puberty. ;-) 
Saturday, there were at least five different kinds of butterflies around. We didn't pause in our work to identify them all - some kind of azure, something that looked like a fritillary, the same duskywings we've been seeing for weeks, sulphurs, cabbage whites and....ta da!...the first Tiger Swallowtail.
This is a good argument for leaving your dandelions grow, if you ask me.
Labels: birds, butterflies, CeVA, dragonflies, spiders
