A seasonal butterfly house

The Western North Carolina Nature Center has a lovely small seasonal butterfly house that I hadn't visited before. Displaying native butterflies (monarchs, gulf fritillaries, painted ladies, buckeyes, sulfurs, giant swallowtails, and others), it's a simple, but very effective display.

A hoop house, covered with black mesh, entering and exiting through double-screen doors is the basic set-up: inexpensive and nice. Raised beds support a variety of nectar plants and many other donated plants creating a nice border mix.

This monarch butterfly benefited from a purple coneflower inflorescence.

An outdoor butterfly garden bed completes the display. Great fun, indeed.

We'll be breaking ground in a couple of weeks for a new Butterfly Garden installation at the Botanical Garden where I work. We're excited about adding lots of host plants for butterfly caterpillars in addition to the nectar plants!

A first spring butterfly

Leaving work at lunchtime, I saw a couple of sulfur butterflies spiraling in a courtship pattern, and a third flying nearby. It was close to 70°F this afternoon, warm and sunny.

Here's a cloudless sulfur taken by Gene Hanson in Arizona. He has a great site with beautiful butterfly images (he was gracious enough to let me use several for one of the Garden's butterfly garden signs).

We have a number of sulfur species; they have great common names such as Clouded Sulphur, Little Yellow, and Cloudless Sulphur, and Southern Dogface. It may have been something like a Little Yellow that I saw, since they had dark-edged wings. But I didn't have time to really get a good look at their markings. Many sulfurs specialize on different legumes for their larval host plants, while a few focus on blueberries and willows.

Garden butterflies

I've seen lots of butterflies in our garden recently. Most are familiar visitors, and always welcome. But I've needed to remind myself recently of the differences between two of the 'regulars' -- tiger and black swallowtails. They belong to a mimicry group of butterflies that mimic pipevine swallowtails.

Male tiger swallowtail

Male tiger swallowtails are yellow with black stripes, but females are either yellow, with blue on the hindwing, or dark, also with blue spots on the hindwing.

It's telling the dark females apart from some of the other dark swallowtails that's harder. Hmm, I see from my Kaufman guide that there's a good bit of variation in the tiger female's dark morph, just to complicate things. But distinguishing black swallowtails to dark tiger females is easy if you get a good look at the lower side of the wing and how it's banded with orange, and then get a good look at the upper wings (easier said than done).

Check out a wonderful butterfly site that I just found at the Massachusetts Butterfly Club, a chapter North American Butterfly Association -- it has a wonderfully useful side-by-side comparison feature, with LOTS of images of each species. Wow. That one is being bookmarked!