northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's an American Senna  (aka Wild Senna), a native plant in the legume family . This is an interesting family of plants. It's the 3rd largest family of land plants behind only the orchids and asters (who are in a close race for 1st place). And while we might be most familiar with them for the beans and peas we eat, they're all around us and in various sizes: Clovers are usually low to the ground wildflowers. Sennas are up to 6 feet in height and straddle that area between wildflowers and shrubs. Kentucky Coffeetrees are trees. This indicates that there are some trees that are more closely related to the string beans in your garden than they are to other trees like oaks, maples, etc. Trees do not form a clade ! The largish, healthy population of American Senna at Duke Farms is suspected to be the reason that a butterfly rarely seen in the rest of Somerset County - the Sleepy Orange - is commonly found there. They and other sulphur butterflies like the Cloudless Sulphu...

Yesterday I originally thought I was seeing 4 Cloudless Sulphurs mudpuddling, but then I noticed that I also photographed a Sleepy Orange almost immediately after that picture. Looking back at the picture with the 4 butterflies, the edge-on one on the left looks quite a bit smaller than the 3 Cloudless Sulphurs for which we have a good view. I'm now thinking that the small one was one of our smaller sulphurs, and likely to be this guy below. Similar to birds, a lot of times you'll see different species feeding together mostly peacefully (though I think birds do have a "pecking order" that probably doesn't occur in butterflies). August 18, 2020 at Duke Farms

Here are 4 3  Cloudless Sulphurs mudpuddling  and one smaller sulphur butterfly. Yes there are 4 butterflies in the picture; over on the left is one positioned almost head-on, and their thin wings almost disappear. (One difficulty with photographing butterflies is getting a reasonably good angle without scaring the butterfly away.) All too often I'll see mudpuddling happening on scat, though in this case actual mud was involved. It's believed that mudpuddling is mostly a male butterfly activity, that the nutrients they acquire gets passed to the female during sex, and ultimately benefits their offspring. August 18, 2020 at Duke Farms

Here's a baby (caterpillar would be more conventional terms) Cloudless Sulphur . I took this picture over 4 years ago and didn't know what it was. This morning when I logged into iNaturalist, it had an ID of Cloudless Sulphur. I then looked that up in my Caterpillars of Eastern North America , and agreed that this was indeed a Cloudless Sulphur caterpillar. You might ask why I didn't just use my caterpillar field guide in the first place: I'm not sure I owned the field guide back in 2016. I wasn't sure this was a caterpillar. Some of the larvae of flies and wasps look pretty similar to moth/butterfly caterpillars. My field guide has over 400 pages of caterpillar species in it, and flipping through them all is either a very slow process or a fairly error-prone process. Despite all those caterpillars in the field guide, it's not complete.  My field guide did show me a picture of the Clouded Sulphur caterpillar, so I was able to rule that out as a candidate. It did...

Here's another Cloudless Sulphur . I know I've shown them before, but the picture came out pretty good. One webpage suggested that the name butterfly came from people observing a Cloudless Sulphur in flight and thinking it resembled a slab of flying butter. I was skeptical: I didn't think this species of butterfly was found in Eurasia (it isn't), so for this to be true English settlers would have needed to arrive in the Americas to name it, and this name would have needed to supplant whatever the English used to call butterflies. Although it's possible that a name inspired by a "flying slab of butter" could have occurred from some sulphur butterfly relative of the Cloudless Sulphur, it sounds at least as plausible that it came from a belief that butterflies ate milk/butter . And it seems possible that butterflies would try and drink nutrients from milk/butter. I've talked before about butterflies mud-puddling, a generic term for when they attempt to su...

Here are a couple more Cloudless Sulphurs .  Both are looking for nectar on teasels; as I mentioned before teasels are invasive plants but are fairly popular with seed-eating birds and pollinators. For that matter, these wildflowers with lots of small flowers on them (like teasels, milkweeds, goldenrods) are frequently quite popular with pollinators since each of those flowers is a potential source of nectar. Remember that these guys are usually noticeably bigger than our our sulphurs (also called yellows), and they usually have little or no markings on the wings. In the first picture you can see they sometimes are a greenish-yellow, while the second picture shows one that's more of a light yellow. While it's tempting to try and use subtle coloring as a primary identification tool, that's probably been the source for most of my misidentifications. Whether it's due to normal color variation or weird lighting, color can mislead you. July 14 at Duke Farms July 14 at Duke F...

Here's a Cloudless Sulphur I met. In most of my area they are the Big 3 of sulphur (yellow) butterflies ... and are the biggest size-wise of our sulphurs. This isn't saying much since they're still smaller than our Monarchs and Swallowtails, but it does help identify them a bit. If our other sulphurs are around, these guys will usually be a little bigger, frequently with a paler yellow and sometimes with a greenish tint. To grow up to be strong healthy butterflies, they need legume plants to eat as caterpillars. This includes the senna that our Sleepy Oranges like, though it sounds like other legumes like clovers can also work for them.

Here's a Sleepy Orange butterfly. This butterfly is one of the sulphurs , and in my area is probably the 4th most common butterfly in the subfamily. It's one of two butterflies that are easily confused with the Orange Sulphur due to similar coloring; the Sleepy Orange is probably only slightly more vibrant and has different markings. By comparison, the Clouded Sulphur is slightly less vibrant than the Orange Sulphur but with virtually identical markings. (The Clouded and the Orange Sulphurs can hybridize. As far as I know, the Sleepy Orange cannot hybridize with either of the others.) We also have Cloudless Sulphurs in my area, but they're less likely to be mistaken for the others because they're both larger and paler. After these 4, I haven't encountered any other sulphurs around here, but these 4 species combine to make mostly-yellow butterflies a very common sight. Up until about 3 years ago the Sleepy Orange hadn't been found in Somerset County, but the ...