Butterfly brigades

You all know about the no-good, very bad year – 2011.  Pitiful amounts of rain resulted in very few blooms. Very few blooms meant no food for traveling butterflies.

Over the winter months, however, we have had rain, and lots of it. The trees, grasses and wildflowers are rejoicing, and putting on a great show of life. And like old friends we haven’t seen in awhile, butterflies have come a-visiting.

Red admiral. The picture isn't upside down, the butterfly is!

In particular, we have an army (battalion? squadron? platoon?) of red admirals (Vanessa atalanta). These are regular visitors here, but this year their numbers are impressive. As I walk or drive on the driveway, they rise up in waves. They flutter around everywhere we walk.

According to Greta Ajjilvsgi in Butterfly Gardening for the South, “the Red Admiral is one of the best known and most widespread butterflies.” Its larval food plants are nettles. It spends time on the ground at moist places (hence its presence on my driveway), and rests on vertical surfaces with its head down. It feeds on sap, fruit and animal droppings, along with various flowers.

Yesterday, I went out to snap pictures, thinking these fellows were sipping nectar from a large patch of prairie verbenas. They were, but really they were more interested in the blooms of the nearby Texas persimmons (which have a heavenly scent, by the way).

Butterfly Central!

Checkered skipper

Painted lady

In the process of documenting the red admiral invasion, I discovered other butterflies visiting, also:  painted ladies, (Vanessa cardui) Checkered skipper (Pyrgus communis), and other unidentified ones. Oddly enough, butterflies don’t hold still for my camera like flowers will.

Most interesting was an eye-catching moth, black with large white patches on its wings. I’ve never seen this critter here before, but (thanks to Peterson First Guides Butterflies and Moths) it is an eight-spotted forester  (Alypia octomaculata).  This moth is diurnal (instead of nocturnal like most moths), with two pale yellow patches on each forewing, and two white patches on each hind wing. It has “tufts of orange hair-like scales” on its legs and yellow shoulders (who knew moths had shoulders?). Quite a few of these are fluttering around the persimmons. Larval food sources are grapes and Virginia creeper, both of which grow here.

Butterflies make me happy. Sounds sappy and cutesy, I know, but I can’t help it. They make me smile.

Welcome home, old and new friends. My outlook is sunnier for your presence!