Featherless Fliers

Butterflies, naturally.  It's high summer.  Hot, humid and here it's really dry. Thankfully, our perennial wildflowers are surviving without watering.  They are attracting some regular visitors.  Here are a few.

This is a Pearly Crescentspot.  I love the little emerald mark on the top of the thorax.

It's a strong flier and aggressive towards other Crescentspots.  It did not stay long in one place, so getting just one image was a challenge.

I'll make a brief sidetrack from butterflies to dragonflies. I saw this Widow Skimmer making several threatening attacks on smaller butterflies like the above Pearly Crescentspot.

They are a hunter, but I'd not considered butterflies on their list. 

Another nervous butterfly was this Baltimore feeding on a stalk of Yarrow.

One of our most successful plants for attracting butterflies is the Echinacea prupurea, or Purple Coneflower.  The Painted Lady, Vanessa cardui, is a frequent visitor.

There are a large number of butterflies in the Skipper family, Hesperiidea.  I failed to conclusively name this one.  Similarly, I mostly failed to follow their erratic flight or focus on most before they moved again.  I got one clear image on a bellflower.

  And, I got one that confronted me on a tiny Coneflower. 

These are all beautiful and engaging, but just about the most anticipated butterfly to our garden is any of the various Swallowtails - big, colorful and strong fliers. This one fed voraciously for so long, that I had over 125 images to select from. Here is the amazing Tiger Swallowtail feeding on the native Monarda fistulosa  in our garden.

This one has been around for a while because it has lost it signature tails.

I love watching how these butterflies twist and turn, sometimes fluttering to reach each nectar tube.

Since I prepared this blog, I spotted another rare visitor to a Coneflower. Fortunately, my camera was setup and waiting for the unexpected.  What could top a Tiger Swallowtail?  The answer is:

Eastern Black Swallowtail !

These swallowtails are really skittish.  I was 8 feet distant, and moved foot closer and the butterfly leaped into flight, circled once and left the property.  Lesson learned.

I'd like to have added a Monarch to this, but they have been impossible to capture before they take off on a long distance flight. It will soon be time for them to be laying eggs on milkweed.  Maybe then.

Paul

A Summer of Lilies

When I think of summer flowers, my thoughts begin with the common Day Lily.   I think of big patches of them along roadsides.

When I wanted this photo, I discovered that they were becoming difficult to find.  It appears town highway departments largely mow them down.   This patch was where the mower couldn't reach.

Look closely at a Day Lily.  Sure, it's common but lovely.

When I think of lilies, I recall this Stargazer Lily that the squirrels brought to our garden many years ago.  It was surely a matter of theft from a neighbor's plantings.  It disappeared a few years later.  Squirrel again?

My pursuit of beautiful lilies includes the Herb Garden at the Cornell Botanic Gardens in nearby Ithaca, where the garden design includes complementary colors surrounding the subject flowers.

Another lily that I have found in the Herb Garden areas is the flamboyant Turk's Cap.  It's on steroids!

I picked the Turk's Cap to prepare for a shift to a native lily that can inspire me to drive as much as 1-3/4 hours to see an abundant colony.   I have a fascination with wild plants that thrive without intervention, and in spite of whitetail deer predation.  So, here is a group of Canada Lilies on the banks of the Susquehanna River, that I was shown in 2015.

Look at how they sometimes erupt into a ring of flowers atop the slender stalk.

In other places, the Canada Lily can hide in a stand of tall grasses. 

I've even seen one - just one - that was in the process of opening.  I love it.

I'll admit that the Day Lilies, Star Gazers and even the Turk's Caps were simply vehicles to bring you to my passion for the Canada Lily.

They are so lovely, and so very wild, that I treasure them each time I find them.

Paul