northeast-flora-and-fauna

I guess I was on a hot streak last spring with Hackberry Emperors , since here's another one. This picture isn't as good as this 1 , but it's at least recognizable as a Hackberry Emperor.  Hackberry Emperors are another species that rarely drinks the nectar that many butterflies rely on, instead getting most of their nourishment from sap and scat. Though I don't recall this happening to me, they'll also drink sweat off of us humans to get nutrients like sodium. On the few occasions that they do drink nectar from flowers they're considered poor pollinators because only their proboscis goes into the flower, greatly limiting the pollen they could pick up. More info on these butterflies is here . June 17, 2023 at Duke Farms Photo 301010242, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

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, (...

A couple weeks ago while talking about a Hackberry Emperor butterfly, I wanted to post a link to my previous post about its relative, the Tawny Emperor . Unfortunately I didn't have one [1], so I'm going to remedy that on Throwback Thursday with a picture from 2.5 years ago. You probably shouldn't feel all that deprived of seeing the Tawny Emperor; it's quite similar to its Hackberry Emperor cousin. In contrast to the Hackberry Emperors I've seen, the Tawny Emperor's coloring is more of a brownish-orange (aka tawny) compared to the brownish-gray of many Hackberry Emperors. But this isn't the best way to ID them since apparently some Hackberry Emperors have the brighter coloring of the Tawnies; a better way is that if the top of the front wing contains 1-2 eyespots (something I talked about here ) then you've got a Hackberry Emperor. As wee little lads and lasses (aka caterpillars) both these emperors like to eat (surpringly): Hackberry Trees  [2]. As a...

Here's a cool-looking butterfly that does it with earth tones, a Hackberry Emperor . It's pretty easy for a butterfly to look good with bright orange or yellow wings, or deep blue ones. The Hackberry Emperor manages it with discreet browns, tans, and a few white spots. (While it's tempting to think they're being tasteful, I suspect they're this color to provide camouflage from predators.) These emperors don't exert absolute power over enormous land areas like some Roman, Chinese, and British empires have. In fact, it's unclear that any other animal recognizes imperial power in these lepidopterans.  September 2, 2022 at Duke Farms Photo 238963661, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

What outranks a Monarch butterfly? Perhaps an emperor, like this Hackberry Emperor ? We don't see a lot of emperors around here, though this is the more common species of our emperors; I see its (similar-looking) Tawny Emperor even less. As you might expect given their name, the Hackberry Emperor uses hackberry trees like our local Common Hackberry  [1] as its host plants. (Their Tawny Emperor cousins also use these trees as hosts.) Unlike many native species, both emperor species appear to be increasing in numbers a bit. Presumably this means we have more hackberry trees than we used to; butterfly populations frequently correlate to the population of their host plants. August 5, 2021 at Duke Farms Photo 148951639, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) [1] Although hackberries are in the elm family, they don't appear to be susceptible to the devastating Dutch Elm Disease .