northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's some Foxglove Beardtongue from last spring. This is a native wildflower with (somewhat) bell-shaped blossoms that's considered popular with all bees but especially favored by bumblebees.  What a name, heh? It almost sounds like the name came from a random name generator that went on too long. It's actually named after 2 different genera of flowers, the foxgloves and the beardtongues . Since Foxglove Beardtongue is a type of beardtongue but is not a type of foxglove, you should probably interpret the name something like "a beardtongue that resembles a foxglove". (Since both foxgloves and beardtongues are in the plantain family , perhaps it's not too surprising that there's a resemblance between the 2 [1].) What are the differences? This article (which seems to mix up species/genus a little) mentions several things, like foxgloves being from Europe and having bell-flowers that hang down while beardtongues are North American plants with tubular flow...

Monarch butterflies are back, though they may not be easy to spot/identify. Though this is my 1st decent (non-blurry) picture of them this season, I've almost certainly been seeing solitary ones fluttering around since mid-May. The main problem right now is that there aren't a lot of flowers in bloom, and many butterflies don't sit still unless there's some nectar for them to slurp up. There is quite a bit of Foxglove Beardtongue in bloom, though this plant seems more popular with bumblebees. Monarchs and many other butterflies (I'm pretty sure I've seen glimpses of Eastern Tiger Swallowtails too) seem to be flying maniacally over the meadows looking for the few nectar sources available to them. But things are changing. Monarchs somewhat surprisingly will visit the non-native Red Clover , and that's in bloom already. Our milkweeds and dogbanes have just started to bloom, and Monarchs (among many other pollinators) love that stuff. Pretty soon there ought t...