Bill's Butterfly Blog

I thought that I was through with butterfly blogs for this year, but things have turned out differently, for I just returned from Texas and the new National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas. The occasion was this biannual gathering of NABA members. I was there just for the main events, Oct. 28-31, so I missed the smaller trips before and after the convention. Two other members of the Rochester Butterfly Club, Lucretia and Shirley, also attended; they arrived before I did.

The new butterfly center is still a work in progress. Although the new visitor’s center was officially opened on Thursday, it was actually finished yet. There’s at least another week of work involved. However, those in attendance at the time did get to see it. The main part of the center, where the butterfly-attracting plantings and the butterflies themselves are found, is some distance behind the new visitor’s center, although there is another visitor’s center back there. The grounds consist of a large, covered pavilion with picnic tables, a nursery, an office building, a restroom building, and several acres of plantings. The plantings are true butterfly 84.99 online soma magnets, and hundreds of butterflies can be found there all day long.

My first field trip was on Friday, led by Jeffrey Glassberg himself. We went to the new butterfly center and then to an area near Bentsen State Park. In one day our group saw 84 species. Later, when all the groups pooled their sightings for that day, we had seen over 120 species of butterflies. Pretty good, especially for those of us who count 20 species as a good day’s work. I took lots of pictures and am now in the process of seeing how many species I can identify. So far, I have Red-Bordered Pixie, Laviana White-Skipper, Tropical Leafwing, Gulf Fritillary, White Peacock, Sickle-winged Skipper, Southern Dogface, Tropical Buckeye, Phaon Crescent, Queen, Great Southern White, and several more. I’ll then have someone check me to see how many mistakes I have made. I’m not even trying to identify several photos of nondescript brown skippers.

On the second day, my group went to an Audubon garden in Weslaco and a state park east of there. We added only a few new sightings to the previous total but they included the very rare Blomfild’s Beauty. Jeff Glassberg has been hot-to-trot to see one of those, and we tried calling him, but he doesn’t carry a cell phone. At the end of the day someone saw a Curved-Wing something-or-other, but by then I was too tired to get out of my chair at the Audubon garden and go see it. Besides, I had seen enough new butterflies to last me a long time.

Of course, they weren’t all new. A few live in our area as well. For instance, Tawny Emperors were everywhere. I also saw a Pearl Crescent, several Monarchs, many Gray Hairstreaks, and many Fiery Skippers.

For my guidebook, I used Butterflies of North America, by Jim P. Brock & Kenn Kaufman.

Unless the weather takes a sudden turn for the (much) better, this may be my last blog of the year. I have been out in my yard trying to get some better pictures of sulphurs, but that’s been the extent of my efforts of late. None of the sulphurs have any orange on them, but surely some are Orange Sulphurs. It’s also a good time of year to photograph white versions of the sulphurs. There seems to be a lot of them, though they don’t often 825 mg augmentin sit still to have their pictures taken.

The only club member I’m getting still sighting reports from is Kim Hartquist. On October 13, she went to Burger Park and saw a Cabbage White, an Orange Sulphur, 3 other sulphurs, a Monarch, and, best of all, four Bronze Coppers. The coppers, she said, were “fairly worn.”

Here’s hoping we get some more sunny days. I’m not yet ready for winter.

A friend who raises Monarchs called today to inquire as to what to do with some fresh Monarchs. She had the chrysalises outside but brought them in when they started to turn black in the cold. Then two of them emerged today. She doesn’t want to just let them go in this weather. I remembered a story of someone with a late Monarch who had gone into a truck stop and sought a truck driver who was heading south. She found one that agreed to take the Monarch with him. I told this story to my friend, and she remembered that she has a relative heading to Florida on Sunday. She then sought advice on how to feed her Monarchs until the southern trip begins, and I told her how. We agreed that her relative doesn’t need to take the Monarchs all the way to Florida. Letting them go in Virginia or the Carolinas should suffice.

It looks like the butterfly season is winding down more quickly than in the past. Perhaps it’s the large amount of ugly weather.

Last week I went to Wesley Hill Preserve, the lower field.( I didn’t feel up to climbing from the pond area back to the parking lot.) 800 mg skelaxin In the lower field, I saw nothing but sulphurs and cabbage whites. Just like in other places I’ve been, including my own yard, I didn’t see any sulphurs with orange on them. These can’t all be Clouded Sulphurs, but I can’t say for sure that I saw any Orange Sulphurs. Maybe we will get a warm spell soon, and some other species will show up.

We still get a few Monarchs drifting through, but I’d say that for the most part the migration is finished. A friend reported that a Monarch has been staying in his yard for three days and has showed no interest in heading south. I also saw one on the cement pad at the boat launch at Oneida Lake yesterday that was just sitting there, occasionally flying up and circling around to light in the same place. I gave it a stern lecture about needing to get going and pointed the way south, but I was ignored. I don’t know what’s going on with these two.

The Black Swallowtail caterpillar that we have been raising has finally pupated. It wandered around all over the enclosure and seemed quite agitated about finding the right place to pupate. Finally, we provided a glass full of parsley with a twig from a nearby bush running through the parsley. The caterpillar pupated with one end attached to the twig and the other resting on parsley. I have read that Black Swallowtails hibernate for the winter in the pupa, so maybe that is what this one is doing. It does seem rather early for that, but we shall see. If nothing happens with the pupa in a few more days, we will find a sheltered place outside for it to spend the winter.

Last Wednesday, the 15th, I spent the afternoon on a farm, or former farm, in Livonia Center. The owner, a woman in her 80s, and I walked around the property and encountered many butterflies. Part of the farm was being hayed by a neighboring farmer, and along the edge of that area was a swampy area that was overgrown at this time of year with goldenrod and tall purple asters. In past years, this has been a magnet for migrating Monarchs, and this day was 6order propecia online no different, except for being a bit chilly. The Monarchs were feeding mostly on the goldenrod and not moving much because of the chill; but they moved when we came along. There must have been several dozens of them and more in other fallow fields. The farm is not a registered way station, but the Monarchs use it anyway on the journey south.

Also plentiful were Pearl Crescents. I’ve need seen so many on that farm. There were also many sulphurs, but the situation was curious. The fields being cultivated for hay were mainly planted with alfalfa, and alfalfa is the host plant of the Orange Sulphur, formerly known as the Alfalfa Butterfly. None of the many sulphurs I saw on the alfalfa showed any orange. They must have been Orange Sulphurs, and I know that many Orange Sulphurs have no orange on them. But could it be that none of them did at this time? As I said, it was curious.

Today my wife and I went for a walk along Hemlock Lake, where the club’s first field trip of the year took place. Like then, the main butterflies we saw were Duskywings. Presumably, these were Wild Indigo Duskywings, for the Juvenal’s that we saw in May are long gone. I counted eleven of them (including a mating pair), along with two Cabbage Whites and a Clouded Sulphur. I wasn’t expecting to see so many butterflies in this area this late in the year. It also seems late for mating, but what do I know?

The Monarchs we raised are all gone. The last one, a female, declined to fly away on the afternoon that she emerged, so we tried again the next morning. She hesitated, and then took off. Our butterfly castle is now an empty nest. The Black Swallowtail that we are raising on a weed pot in our kitchen window seems to have reached the fifth instar, for it is pretty big. For a while, it switched from dill to parsley, but today it went back to the dill. It is stretched out along one sprig of dill as though getting ready to pupate. We shall see.

All in all, I’m encouraged that there is still so much action in the butterfly population. I hope to spend many more days in the fields. Winter will come all too soon.

Our last Monarch has emerged from its chrysalis. We are keeping her overnight, for she wouldn’t fly away even though we gave her three chances. She just sits there on the hand exercising her wings but not taking off. Maybe she sees a big scary world out there. I know the feeling. When she does leave, our Monarch raising will be over for the year.

However, we do have a larva from a Black Swallowtail that showed up on a dill plant in our garden. We brought it inside on the dill but also brought in some parsley, which Black Swallowtails are supposed to prefer. It shows no interest in the parsley, so I guess that dill is part of the same family.

Even though the days are cool, that’s no reason to give up on looking for butterflies. Kim Hartquist reports seeing 8 species on Sept. 11, even though the temperature was only 70. She saw two Question Marks, which she said were “gorgeous.” I’d like to have seen them.

I, too, saw eight species, this time on Monday, Sept. 13. My list contains 6lowest propecia price no fewer than seven Eastern Tailed Blues. They were everywhere in the small field near the cartop boat launch by the Conesus Lake inlet. I also saw several very fresh specimens–a Monarch, A Great Spangled Frit, and a Wild Indigo Duskywing.

Tomorrow I will be visiting a farm with an alfalfa field. Last year that field was loaded with Orange Sulphurs. A nearby field has the tall purple asters, which some years are popular with migrating Monarchs. I’ll take my camera along.

Keep looking for butterflies and sending me reports. There’s still at least a month of sightings left.

Last Friday night we had an experience we have heard of but not something we had seen before—a group of Monarch butterflies roosted across the street. There were two sections, each on different branches of the same tree. Our next-door neighbors spotted the Monarchs collecting there and called us to come across the street to the lawn of a house that is for sale and has no one living there. Butterflies kept arriving for half and hour and then they all settled in for the night. They sat so still and blended in the foliage so well that you wouldn’t have spotted them if you hadn’t seen them arriving. Evening was darkening so that I couldn’t get good photos.

The next morning I was up early and went across the street followed by my neighbor Ron in his bare feet. At first I thought the Monarchs had gone, but Ron pointed out that they were still there, sitting so still that they were hard to see even in the growing daylight. Another neighbor and her young daughter came to see what was going on. We watched for awhile and then, suddenly, a mass of butterflies arose at the same time from their shadowy roost and began scattering to nearby sunlit trees to warm up. 6buy generic propecia A row of three pecan trees seemed to attract most of them. A few consider landing on a pine but decided not to.

Because of the poor light on the roost itself, I didn’t get any good photos. Ron’s wife, Sue, is a better photographer than I and has promised me a CD with her photos on it. This was truly an impressive sight that I want to view again, many times.

On the home front, our last caterpillar climbed to the roof of the Butterfly Castle and pupated. We also have been releasing one of two adults daily as soon as they emerged and dried off. We haven’t kept count, but we have probably released between 15 and 20 so far.

We have had our problems as well as our successes with raising butterflies. I had always heard that if a pupating Monarch couldn’t get rid of its skin, that Monarch was doomed. We haven’t had a problem with that because I was always there to remove the skin if the butterfly was having trouble. But one caterpillar pupated at night, and I didn’t pull off the skin until the next day. It was too late. The pupa was undersized, and when the adult emerged, it was extremely deformed. I had to destroy it. I sure felt bad. Then the Clouded Sulphur we were raising emerged and promptly died. I don’t know why. It was perfectly formed and, like any Clouded when seen up close, was beautiful. I felt bad about that, too. Then another Monarch pupa apparently died; it turned the color of imminent emergence, but nothing further happened.

But that’s butterflies for you. Most of the time they raise your spirits, but sometimes they break your heart.

My friend Bernie and I went fishing Thursday at Oneida Lake and saw four Monarchs. They appeared to be coming across the lake from the north—heading south. Maxine, ever the skeptic, says that this is too small of a sample to draw any conclusions from. After all, we were fishing along the south shore of Oneida; the Monarchs could have just circled out over the lake from the south. All right, so it’s a small sample. It still looked pretty convincing to me.

I’m trying to get out of the business of raising Monarchs, but I keep finding eggs as I get milkweed to feed my herd. If I see the eggs before I pull up the plant, I just leave the plant alone. But sometimes I don’t see them until I have the plant in the house. We have seven or eight chrysalises and about the same number of large caterpillars that should be pupating soon. I’ll be out of the business in a couple of weeks, I hope.

I visited 6buy cheap propecia Wesley Hill Preserve this afternoon. I saw nine species, but there weren’t many of each species. The freshest were three American Ladies and an Eastern Comma, seen in the Anna’s Pond area. The section accessed by Wesley Hill Road had only Cabbage Whites and a lone Clouded Sulphur, plus a Pearl Crescent I saw on the way out.

I had been hoping to see Meadow Frits, but no luck. They must have finished early this year, like so many other species. Flat-topped asters were everywhere, though.

I get the distinct feeling that the butterfly season is winding down. If true, that would be a disappointment.

On Saturday, Maxine and I took our Monarch eggs, caterpillars, and chrysalises to the farmers’ market in LeRoy. We were part of the “entertainment” for the day. The other part was a woman playing sing-alongs on a keyboard.

It wasn’t a really busy market day, but we had a lot of visitors anyway, mostly parents and their kids. Some kids and parents remembered releasing Painted Ladies during elementary school. That used to be part of the third grade curriculum, but was taken out a year or so ago, probably to give kids more time to prepare for the new tests that are restricting the curriculum these days. Along with the Monarch specimens I posted maps of how Monarchs come north in the spring and summer and go back to Mexico in the fall. I also had a poster with photos of some common local butterflies.

The highlight of the day was watching a Monarch in a J shed its skin and form itself into a chrysalis. That’s something you don’t get to see every day. Those who noticed the conversion starting got so excited that eventually a small crowd gathered to watch what was going on. Some of the vendors also came over. It probably helped that I myself got excited and was waving people over. (Yes, I do get excited now and then.)

We also had with us a fairly large caterpillar of a Clouded Sulphur and one of a Cabbage White that had just hatched that morning. A new Cabbage White caterpillar is unbelievably small, and everyone had to stare at the leaf for awhile 6buy cheap levitra until they could pick it out.

Our first adult Monarchs had begun emerging several days before this. They belonged to a group that had begun pupating about 10 days before. We had hoped that at least one would wait until Saturday to emerge, but no such luck. Three emerged on Wednesday, four on Thursday, and the last one on Friday. I don’t expect more to emerge until this weekend.

I’m trying to avoid bringing in more eggs, but it seems that every time I get fresh milkweed for our largest caterpillars, at least one egg will turn up on the plants I gathered. Oh well, we’re not planning on going anywhere.

On Monday, August 9 I went to Rattlesnake Hill WMA to scout the area in advance of Wednesday’s scheduled field trip. I mainly wanted to find out if there were any other kinds of fritillaries besides Great Spangleds in what used to be the “frit field” way back on Trail 10. It used to be the only place we could see all four species of the local frits in one place. You may remember that the DEC fixed that field to make way for more wild turkeys, and that eliminated the frits last year. However, the field hasn’t be treated again, and everyone has been wondering if the frits would come back. They have not. I counted 10 frits on the trail and in the field, but as best I could determine, all were Great Spangleds. They were rather worn, though, and there could have been an Atlantis or an Aphrodite in the group, though I doubt it. There definitely were none of the smaller Meadow frits.

That eliminated the need for making the long walk back to the frit field during our field trip on Wednesday. As for what then the group did on Wednesday, I’ll let Mary Jane fill you in because I got there late and left before the others did. I also missed the ice cream.

RATTLESNAKE HILL WMA
August 11, 2010
William McCleary and Mary Jane Proschel

If you’d like a taste of Adirondack scenery but don’t want to travel that far, take a drive about an hour and a half south of Rochester to Rattlesnake Hill Wildlife Management Area. Standing on the dike behind the information kiosk and looking across the pond, you’d think you had been transported to that locality. Of course, the butterflies wouldn’t 6best propecia prices have been the same and butterflies were, after all, what we were in search of when we started off on our field trip.
The positive change in attitude/approach of DEC staff was evident in the obvious reduction of mowing done in the area. I can recall the feeling of frustration in past years, after having driven there, only to find myself one step behind the mowing crew. That certainly was not the case this year. Paths that had been mowed earlier in the summer were now somewhat grown up and had sprouted a new crop of milkweed that was in flower and was a Monarch magnet. The field at the horse trailer area had also been previously mowed but was now abundant with Monarchs in all stages of development – from eggs to larvae of varying sizes to newly emerged adults that were still drying their wings prior to their inaugural flight. It just goes to show that not all mowing is a bad thing – if done at the right time.
Clouded Sulphurs took the prize for abundance (32) with one white form female being observed laying eggs on clover and twelve others engaged in a puddling event. They were followed in numbers by the second brood of Common Ringlets (24). Least Skippers (11) flitted like fleas through the grass in the wet areas and, of course, the Monarchs (8) are always a joy to watch as they seem to float effortlessly through the air. A total of thirteen species were observed, which wasn’t too bad for the later part of the season. It was only fitting that we upped our count to fourteen (a Black Swallowtail) while enjoying some ice cream at the “giraffe” in Nunda.

The address for the Genesee Land Trust property in Caledonia given in my last blog is slightly off. The house number should be 3728, which is right next door to the one given before. The rest of the directions are accurate. There is a hard-top parking lot at 3728, and the building looks like it used to be a club of some kind.

I spent a couple of hours at the meadow owned by the Genesee Land Trust and saw lots of butterflies, though not as many as Steve Daniels saw. I was especially hoping to see a lot of Giant Swallowtails but didn’t see a single one. I did see a spat over mating among some Spicebush Swallowtails. She was mildly interested in mating, and he was a lot interested. Then another male came along, and the three went round and round. It lasted so long that I was able to get some photos of the goings-on.

The day was partially overcast. There was a lot of action when the sun was out and not so much otherwise. There was even a brief period of rain. This is a good spot maybe to put on our list of field trips next year.

WARNING about Oak Openings

If you go to Oak Openings, be prepared for chiggers. Use 600 mg neurontin insect repellent and seal off your trouser legs. The chiggers are even worse this year than before. I have the chigger bites to prove it!