Tiger Swallowtails are big butterflies. Canary-sized butterflies, with wingspreads approaching 5½”. The males are tiger-striped. Some of the females share that yellow and black coloration, and a tiger with an extra dollop of blue on the hind wings is likely to be a female.
The BugLady puts out oranges for the birds—orioles, house finches, catbirds, and several species of woodpeckers eat the pulp. The BugLady guesses that ants, flies and German yellowjackets and raccoons would be the first and most numerous guests at the table, but that some interesting stuff would come to the night-time table.
Today we take to the air with three big dragonflies that belong to a group called the King Skimmers; 12-Spotted Skimmer, Common Whitetail, and Widow Skimmer. Represented by 103 species in North America, the Skimmer family (Libellulidae) contains our most common and conspicuous dragonflies.
Today’s two beetles are biters. There’s oodles of information about one of them, the sap beetle because its path intersects with ours regularly; the other is one of a legion of anonymous, gray, long-horned beetles.
The two moths that are featured today, the Walnut Sphinx and the Spotted Thyris, are pretty different from each other—one large, one small; a day flyer and a night-flyer; one from a very large family and one practically an only child; one well-biographied and the other barely known.
The BugLady and her camera have been skulking about the pond edges, feeding the mosquitoes and looking for damselflies, and there are now has many fuzzy damselfly images on the cutting room floor. Damselflies often hang out where it is dark and green and leafy (and protected from predators, which include dragonflies), and generally stay below waist height.
It’s a good thing that the BugLady doesn’t have nearby neighbors (or a Home Owners’ Association) who might be alarmed about someone who turns on the porch light and then creeps around taking pictures of porch critters at midnight.
The Grapevine Epimenis certainly looks like a small butterfly (wingspread about an inch), and it is a daytime flyer in woodlands and edges in the eastern half of the U.S. and into Ontario. Adults nectar on the flowers of a few early-blooming fruit trees like cherries and plums and on sumac, and they like redbud. Grape Leaf Folders get their name from the habit of their caterpillars of folding grape (and Virginia creeper, redbud, and some evening primrose) leaves and webbing them shut. They can become pests in vineyards—high infestations damage leaves, which may lower production, damage fruits, and affect the next crop.
Daphnias are at the lower limit of what the BugLady can accomplish with her macro lens (though she does have a recognizable shot of a Cyclops…). So, back into the water we go and into the realm of the NETI—not the pot, the “ Not-Exactly-True-Insects. ” Daphnias, aka water fleas , are yet another example of great stories coming in small packages.
Salt Marsh Caterpillar Moths like sunny places—wet, dry, and disturbed, and can be found from the Atlantic coast all the way to Alaska and the Yukon. The SMC is a very mobile little critter, moving fast and far looking for edibles. The females lays masses of —from 400 to 1,000 at once—on host plants, and she (not surprisingly) dies a few days later. The eggs hatch in four or five days, and the caterpillars hang out and feed together during their first two instars (more than quintupling their size) before going their separate ways.