Mercurial May

What a strange month May was this year! It seems that every time I had a day off work to go out nature-watching, it was either rainy, cold, windy, or dark and gloomy; none are good conditions for bird photography, and of course butterflies and dragonflies were scarce, if flying at all. Nonetheless, I was able to  visit a few places and take a few photos to share with you.

To start out the month, my aunt from California flew in to Richmond for a couple of Roads Scholars trips (previously named Elderhostel), and I spent the weekend and my birthday with her in Richmond. On Saturday we went to Maymont Park (photo above), but spring had not yet arrived there; it was cold and cloudy. It's a gorgeous park, though, and I intend to go there sometime in the summer; it has lots of possibilities for butterflies and dragonflies.

On Sunday we went on a pontoon boat Bald Eagle tour up the James River with Captain Mike, owner of "Discover the James" (http://www.discoverthejames.com). I highly recommend his trips; his pontoon boat seats six participants and he drives it about seven miles along the James pointing out the wildlife along the way. The focus of our trip was Bald Eagles, and they did not disappoint; we saw about 7 or 8 of them. Mike knows them all and their territories, as he has studied them for years, and knows where to find them. Unfortunately for me, it was another dark and dreary day, and the eagle photos I took are a bit dark and blurred -- but I'll share one anyway. The first photo below is of one of the Bald Eagles in flight clutching a fish, and the second is a Great Blue Heron that has just grabbed a fish that Captain Mike threw its way.

On the home front in Chesapeake, breeding season is in full swing. I have a bird house in my front yard that was investigated early in the month by Chickadees and even Eastern Bluebirds, but in the end a pair of House Wrens won the battle for it, and have built their nest inside; I should hear the babies soon.

Eastern Bluebird male investigating the bird house

One of the House Wrens that won the battle for the bird house.

An interesting fact about House Wrens: the males arrive on their breeding territories earlier than the females, and spend their time building multiple nests to impress the females. When the female arrives, she will hop from nest to nest to nest, and finally pick the one that strikes her fancy. Or desert to the neighboring male if she likes his nests better.

Last fall I posted photos in this blog of some impressive moth caterpillars that friends and neighbors brought to me. I put the caterpillars in my screen cages, and fed them until they went into their cocoon or pupae stages. They overwintered in that stage on my front porch, and two weeks ago one of them, the Polyphemus Moth, emerged! Below is the photo I took last fall of the caterpillar, followed by the moth:

I didn't even realize that the moth had emerged until I noticed two other Polyphemus Moths that were perched on my house near the cages. I then realized that "my" moth had emerged, and she was a female! Females send out their scent, or pheromones, and males can detect that scent from several miles away; the two moths on my house were males that came looking for my female. Here's a picture of one of the males; one of the ways to tell the male and females apart is to look at their antenna. The male's are much "fatter" than the female's (You can click on my photos to get an enlarged version for closer viewing):

By the next day I had five males, so I put them all in the cage with the female, hoping they would breed, which they did:

I should have kept the female in the cage with the leaves of her host plant (Oak), so she could lay her eggs and I could raise more caterpillars; this is what most other butterfly and moth enthusiasts would have done. But the adult Polyphemus Moth, like most of the other large Silk Moth species, lives for only seven days, and I just didn't want her to die in my cage. So I left the cage door open one night and all the moths left to complete their life cycles in the wild.

This is also the time of year that Luna Moths, another of the Silk Moths, emerge from their overwintering cocoons. Below is one that we found on the library's outside brick wall. Like the Polyphemus Moth, Lunas emerge, breed, lay eggs, and die within a 7-day span. They do not eat or drink in the adult stage; their sole purpose is to reproduce.

On a warm day in mid-May, I took a short walk along the Dismal Swamp Canal Trail in Chesapeake. If you haven't been there, you should go check it out. An 8.5-mile multi-use trail runs along the Dismal Swamp Canal, paralleling the old Route 17 to the North Carolina border. It is used by nature lovers, runners, bicyclists, and all manner of outdoor enthusiasts. (Check out the website at  www.cityofchesapeake.net/DSCT). I generally prefer to bird on the less populated west side of the Dismal Swamp, accessed in several places from Suffolk, but the Canal Trail is a nice, quick, easy place to access some of the Swamp's unique habitat if I don't have a lot of time to travel over to Suffolk.

Since the weather was warm, a few butterflies were active, and even though none were unusual species, I enjoyed photographing some "old friends." Here are a few favorites:

 Red-spotted Purple Butterfly
A lot of our swallowtail species also have black-with-blue coloration, but note that the 
Red-spotted Purple does not have the "tails" that the Swallowtails do.

 Zebra Swallowtail

 Tiger Swallowtails mineraling 

Spicebush Swallowtail

Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher

I threw in the photo of the Gnatcatcher because I've been trying, unsuccessfully, to get a decent photo of one, and I finally did. These tiny little birds are almost everywhere in the spring and summer months, and you've undoubtedly heard them even if you didn't know it; they have a soft wheezy, nasally, rambling song. These little guys are very active, like Kinglets, and are usually flitting about high up in a tree. They are also very curious; if you make "pishing" sounds, they will usually come in closer to investigate you, which is what the one in my photo did.

So, here comes summer now, and I hope that the excessive rains we had in May finally cease! If they do, I'll be out looking for birds and insects to photograph at Mackay Island, Piney Grove, Back Bay, Maymont Park, and hopefully some places in the Piedmont and in the Blue Ridge; the more different kinds of habitat you visit, the more possible species there are to find. I'll let you know what I saw next time, and if you want to share your own sitings with me, please feel free to comment. Or better yet, bring your photos to my next "Nature Photo Night" at the Chesapeake Central Library, which will be on Monday, July 29 at 6:00 p.m. Call me at 410-7147 if you would like more information about this -- ask for Karen.

Mid-summer in far southeastern Virginia is not my favorite time to go birding or butterflying, or to take nature walks. Oppressive temperatures and humidity become unbearable and biting insects, snakes and ticks become more troublesome. I’m willing to put up with these annoyances when there is a lot of bird activity to witness, but not so much when things are slower, as they generally are in the summer (compared to spring and fall). Last weekend I went on a butterfly walk at Back Bay, a place I love in the right season, but on a hot, stagnant day in mid-July there were lots of people but very few birds or butterflies, and all I came home with was a bad sunburn and a mediocre photo of a Cottonmouth (above)! Don’t get me wrong, there is wildlife to see, and the occasional summer rarity passes through, but at this time of year, I tend to do more critter-watching in my own yard than I do out in the wild places.

Over the last few years I have planted native plants in my yard that attract native wildlife, and honestly, I’m seeing more butterflies now visiting my yard than I see anywhere else. There are actually several species of Skippers that I have never seen anywhere except in my own yard. When you plant the right native plants in a concentrated area, you become an oasis in an otherwise biologically bare monoculture of lawns and non-native, exotic plants that do not sustain our native wildlife, and the critters will find you. And once they find you, they continue to return.

I like to raise and release butterflies. I find the caterpillars in my yard, house them in screen cages, and feed them until they go into chrysalis. They stay in the chrysalis stage in the cage until they emerge as adult butterflies; then I release them into my yard. In order to get caterpillars in your yard in the first place, you have to know which native plants the caterpillars eat; caterpillars of each species eat only certain kinds of plants. So if you learn what these plants are and plant them in your yard, you’re likely to attract egg-laying adults. Butterflies cannot reproduce in the absence of the host plant that they are biologically bound to; that’s why non-native plant species cannot support reproduction of our native butterflies.

So far I have raised and released well over 3000 individual butterflies. I have also had the pleasure in recent years of raising a few moths, which has been a real treat because the night-flying adults of most moth species are seldom seen by most of us and are therefore more “mysterious.” Some of them are also very striking, very large, and very fascinating to look at. Moths have the same requirement that butterflies do; they each have specific native host plants that they must seek out for egg-laying and caterpillar food. Planting native plants has brought moths to my yard that I wasn’t even aware of before.

The first moth I ever raised was a Pawpaw Sphinx Moth, a species obviously tied to the native Pawpaw tree. I planted one of these trees in my yard 7 or 8 years ago because it is the sole host plant for the gorgeous Zebra Swallowtail and I wanted Zebras to lay eggs in my yard. One day I was searching the tree for Zebra caterpillars, and was surprised to find this guy instead:




I searched through my library of field guides and was able to ID it as a Pawpaw Sphinx Moth caterpillar. I collected it, fed it Pawpaw leaves, watched it go into its cocoon, and a few weeks later successfully emerge as an adult moth with a beautiful, complicated brown, black and white pattern. Here it is on my own finger:



Last fall I was cleaning up my yard and stumbled upon two Io Moth caterpillars, the first I had ever seen. I did a little research and learned that they eat Wild Cherry, so I collected them and fed them from my Wild Cherry tree. (By the way, Io caterpillars are famous for their sting, so if you see one, do not touch it directly).

I also learned that this moth species burrows underground when it is ready to go into the pupae stage, so I put my caterpillars in an aquarium filled with several inches of dirt and dried leaves. Sure enough, when they were done feeding they burrowed into the dirt, went into the pupae phase and spent the winter there, in the aquarium on my front porch. And in June, they both emerged, on consecutive days, in their beautiful adult stage! Io Moths are known for the "eyes" on their upper hindwing; you can see why in the photo below. This one is a female (the male is even brighter!):



The incredible creature below is the caterpillar or larva stage of the Cecropia Moth, which is the largest North American moth, one of the Giant Silk Moths:



In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit that I did not find this caterpillar in my own yard -- but I could have, because one of their host plants is Wild Cherry, which I have. A fellow raise-and-release enthusiast had several Cecropia cocoons in a cage, and she was not at home when they emerged into adults. By the time she came home and found them, they had already mated and laid "hundreds" of eggs. I obtained one of the tiny caterpillars when it was no more than a quarter of an inch long, and started to feed it the Wild Cherry. Here's its picture a few weeks later, when it was fatter and juicier; these guys get to be up to five inches long!


Caterpillars go through several "instars between molts; in other words, they shed their skin when they outgrow it several times as they mature. In this photo, you can actually see the caterpillar's shed skin in the upper right corner. What I found fascinating is that the shed skin includes the old spikes and colored balls that you see on the fresh caterpillar!

I have been feeding this caterpillar for almost two months now, and finally this week it stopped eating and started to spin its silk cocoon on the side of its screen cage. In a few weeks or maybe even next year, the moth should emerge, and will look like this (photo courtesy of Great Hill Horticultural Foundation):




Cecropias occur throughout eastern North America, west to the Rocky Mountains, but are seldom seen by most of us because they are active at night. I hope to find their caterpillars one day on my own Wild Cherry tree; I'll be looking.


I have raised and released around 150 butterflies so far this summer, but the peak months have not yet even begun. Moth and butterfly numbers will increase over the next two months or so, and I will be much busier finding and feeding voracious caterpillars, then experiencing the joy of releasing them as butterflies. Some will emerge this summer or fall, and some will actually overwinter as chrysalis in my cages and emerge next year. If you’re interested in knowing which native plants are hosts to which species, or would like any more details about the raise-and-release process, please don’t hesitate to contact me; I love sharing the knowledge!