northeast-flora-and-fauna

Most of the time when you see a slightly large orange butterfly with black "veins" in NJ, you're seeing a Monarch . But not all the time. Every once in a while you could be seeing a Viceroy  (this this guy). While they look quite similar, there is an excellent field mark to tell the difference. There's a dark line that parallels the back wing; see the circled blue in the 2nd picture. Though both the Viceroy and the Monarch look similar and can be found nectaring on flowers, their lives also have important differences. As you've probably heard by now Monarch caterpillars eat poisonous milkweed plants and become poisonous themselves as a result. Something similar happens with Viceroys, but as caterpillars they eat trees in the willow family , absorb salicylic acid from the trees, and become somewhat poisonous themselves. This is why their relationship with Monarch is now considered to be Mullerian mimicry , where both species benefit from looking like one another. ...

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 Monarch butterfly. This was the first one I photographed in 2020, and it was spotted on July 14. I suspect they could have been seen earlier. (My bout with Lyme Disease was keeping me at home for a while.) These mostly orange-and-black butterflies are pretty easy to spot, though we do have another similar-but-unrelated butterfly in the NJ area, the Viceroy . (The Viceroy is a little smaller and has a slightly different wing pattern.) Still, in most areas the Monarchs greatly outnumber the Viceroys, so if you see a butterfly that looks like this it's usually a Monarch. The Monarch caterpillars are dependent on milkweed plants - their leaves is all they'll eat. I don't know if they have preferences among the milkweed species (we have several in NJ), but it needs to be a milkweed. Even the similar dogbane species aren't acceptable to a growing Monarch caterpillar. Milkweed plants help Monarchs twice; milkweed nectar from the flowers is popular with adult Mona...