northeast-flora-and-fauna

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 ...

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. 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 ...