northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here are a couple butterflies I met last spring, a Great Spangled Fritillary and a Hackberry Emperor . Both of them are midsized butterflies of 1 main color but with a lot of complicated patterns too. Despite these similarities, the mostly orange Great Spangled Fritillary and the mostly brown Hackberry Emperor are unlikely to be mistaken for 1 another, at least if you get a good look at them. (It might get more difficult if you throw the Variegated Fritillary and/or the Tawny Emperor into the mix.) I'm told that the proper way to address an emperor is "Your Imperial Majesty"; remember this if you run across a Hackberry Emperor. (I'm guessing you could address a Great Spangled Fritillary as "Your Greatness", though I could be wrong about that.) Great Spangled Fritillary June 15, 2023 at Sourland Mountain Preserve Photo 300991022, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) Hackberry Emperor June 15, 2023 at Sourland Mountain Preserve Photo 300993316, (...

If you like your colors between red and yellow on the visible light spectrum , orange you going to be glad to see this post. Amidst the vibrantly orange Butterfly Milkweed there are 3 primarily orange butterflies: Just right of center and probably the reason I noticed the activity is a Monarch butterfly. My recollection is that these milkweeds were pretty far out into a meadow, and I didn't notice the Great Spangled Fritillary until I got my binoculars on them. This butterfly is just to the left of the Monarch. But it wasn't until I got home and processed the photos that I realized there was also a Pearl Crescent in there too, a little to the left of the Great Spangled Fritillary. Generally speaking, I don't see open hostility between most pollinators. It's not at all uncommon to see butterflies, bees, wasps, and other pollinators near one another and (mostly) going about their own business. There are other instances though when I'm not sure what's going o...

I've discussed before the various insects that are attracted to milkweed , and this Great Spangled Fritillary and Red Milkweed Beetle represent the 2 main motivations of those insects. The Red Milkweed Beetle represents the insects that want to eat (some parts of) the milkweed, while the Great Spangled Fritillary represents the pollinators that are just here for the nectar. While I'd like to think these guys are friendly acquaintances who meet at the milkweed the way coworkers meet at the water cooler, the realist in me suspects that (at best) they only recognize each other as non-predators they can be around without fear of being eaten. June 15, 2022 at Sourland Mountain Preserve Photo 210218218, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

It looks like I caught this Great Spangled Fritillary in flight, something I rarely attempt because of the difficulties of properly focusing on a moving target. I was probably either: Relying on the camera's autofocus to get a picture of a distant butterfly, Or maybe I had focused on a butterfly and snapped a picture just after it started flying off that spot. Though this particular individual looks especially bright (perhaps aided by just the right sunlight), Great Spangled Fritillaries are large and orange enough to be both conspicuous and a fairly easy identification. Though orange is a fairly popular color in the butterfly community, their particular pattern makes them difficult to confuse with anything other than a couple rarer and smaller fritillary cousins like this Variegated Fritillary . On this June trip to Sourland Mountain Preserve, the Great Spangled Fritillaries were out in force; I probably saw 15-20 of them that day. Except for bees, they were probably the primary ...

Here's a Variegated Fritillary from last autumn, probably near the end of the season when you've got a reasonable chance of finding them. This is a species that used to be an uncommon visitor from the south, but these days it's far from jaw-dropping to spot one. Similar to the Monarch (who admittedly migrates further), this species is a migrator, fleeing south for the winter and returning again the next summer. It's possible that climate change lets them migrate south to higher latitudes than in previous decades and making their return trip the next summer both shorter and more likely to occur. Like its more commonly seen relative the Great Spangled Fritillary (who I've shown before ), violets are the host plants for the Variegated Fritillary. October 15, 2021 at Duke Island Park Photo 168430239, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) Though it's not difficult to confuse this fritillary with the Great Spangled Fritillary, I usually get suspicious if ...

It seems like if you want to attract butterflies, you should get some Wild Bergamot ; here's yet another butterfly attracted to this wildflower: a Great Spangled Fritillary . These are one of my favorite butterflies. Their orange-and-black coloring and relatively large size make them easy to spot and fairly easy to identify. Probably the easiest butterfly (in my area) with which to mistake the Great Spangled Fritillary is the Aphrodite Fritillary , which has a black spot near the base of the forewing that the GSF lacks, and which is generally smaller. (My pictures don't show that spot, but the fritillaries I was seeing were almost the size of the Monarchs. I don't think an Aphrodite would ever get that large.) People sometimes see a Pearl Crescent and wonder if it's a baby GSF, but of course butterflies don't grow that way. They're pretty much at their full size when they emerge from their chrysalis. (I will admit that it's a little hard to see the pattern ...

Here's a Great Spangled Fritillary I met early in the summer, probably nectaring on Common Milkweed. This is a classic wildflower for the Great Spangled Fritillary; they seem to prefer flowers that are purple/pink/red. (Although not very many animals can eat milkweed plants, their nectar is popular with lots of pollinators.) There's also a purple link to them as caterpillars; they use violets as host plants. Caterpillars that hatch this year actually don't eat until after hibernating through the coming winter. When things start to warm up, they'll hopefully find some healthy violet leaves to chow down on. As butterflies whose development is tied to winter, I would have expected to see all of the summer's GSFs approximately the same time of year, but I've seen them June - August. I don't know why some would emerge from hibernation significantly sooner, so I suspect some caterpillars take longer to find the violets they need to eat. I suspect that these guys ...