northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's a Sleepy Orange butterfly I found on the ground last summer. (You can check out their open-wing look here .) They'll generally drink nectar, though like many butterflies they'll sometimes supplement that diet with minerals they get from scat, drying mud, etc.  I don't think there was much nutrition on this leaf, so in this case I'm thinking the butterfly was probably just hanging out here because the temperature was about right and/or it was construed as a relatively safe spot to rest. Maverick theory: That yellow leaf to the butterfly's left isn't too far from the color of a sulphur butterfly; could this butterfly have flown down to see if the leaf was a potential mate or rival? I don't know, and the butterfly wasn't talking. August 23, 2022 at Duke Farms Photo 229694897, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

Here is a butterfly that's moved into the area fairly recently, the Sleepy Orange . Presumably within the last 10 years, some adventurous pioneer butterflies flew northward and found a home at Duke Farms. AFAIK they aren't yet found elsewhere in Somerset County, though there is now a healthy and robust population at Duke Farms that it seems like only a matter of time before they'll colonize other parts of the county and state [1]. They are (generally) similar to but smaller and more vibrant than their Orange Sulphur cousins. Though they're probably the sulphur butterfly I saw the most at Duke Farms this year, they were only 3rd during our butterfly count. (Other sulphurs were spotted a lot in the Community Garden and the Skeet Shoot/Duchess Farm parts of the property.) When their wings are open (not their typical resting position), their yellow-orange wings framed with near-black around the edges really can be fairly striking. July 28, 2022 at Duke Farms Photo 22206704...

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...

I suspect I took this picture of a Sleepy Orange butterfly that was moving around a lot. It wasn't until I got around to getting a close look at the picture that I think I see something interesting about it. First, the leaves look like the Wild Senna that's fairly common at Duke Farms. And Wild Senna is one of the legumes that Sleepy Oranges (and some other sulphur butterflies ) use as host plants. And finally, the butterfly seems to be positioned a little unusually with the end of the abdomen touching the underside of a leaf. Put all these together, and I'm fairly sure this was a female Sleepy Orange laying eggs on the Wild Senna plants. If this culminated in an adult butterfly (predation is a challenge for most species), I suspect it'd have migrated south since Sleepy Oranges aren't believed to be able to overwinter here in NJ. (Note that some of its relatives like the Orange Sulphur and Clouded Sulphur can overwinter up here.) July 24, 2021 at Duke Farms Photo ...

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'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 a Sleepy Orange Butterfly I saw as a part of the basically-annual Duke Farms butterfly count. This is a day when some local lepidopterists , some Duke Farms staff, and some Duke Farms volunteers (I'm in this last category) gather at Duke Farms to count butterflies. Generally we split up into 2-3 groups to cover different areas of the property, count the butterflies we're able to identify (sometimes they fly off before we can tell what the butterfly was), and then the results get combined into a report. The butterflies are not collected or even caught - this is a purely observational event. The Sleepy Orange is one of the more interesting stories to come out of the butterfly count. Two years ago the lepidopterists were excited to see a Sleepy Orange Butterfly, and then another one, and then another one. After they got to maybe a dozen of them, they were not as excited by seeing them, though the big story was that it wasn't known that Sleepy Oranges were in Somers...

Here are a pair of Sleepy Orange Butterflies . One seems to be nectaring on a Wild Teasel (an invasive species, though not usually an especially bad one) while other other was either coming in for a landing -or- maybe checking out a potential romantic partner or rival. It's not too surprising to me that a native butterfly is drinking nectar from a non-native plant. Nectar is mostly sugary water, so chemically this nectar is probably fine for our pollinators. And if plants that depend on pollinators (plants that don't pollinate through the wind) weren't acceptable to our pollinators, they simply wouldn't survive here. I'm suspicious that the one on the teasel is a male. If we could see the top view of the wings, the males have a dark border that's sharp while the females have fuzzier dark borders. I think I can see the border through the wing, so I'm assuming that implies the border is pretty sharp. Unfortunately I can't see the borders well at all on th...

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 ...