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, (...

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 ...