Butterflies and Moths

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[url=]Sulfur cat[/url]

Here's the sulfur cat. You may know which sulfur it is.

I still don't have a good grip on how the various hosting sites work. I didn't realize there were comments to move to. A part of not growing up with it. My theses were written with a typewriter.

And all the photos I took, when I was doing that, were on film and are now quite faded. It is wonderful you have such tools like digital cameras and online resources.

From your inature photos, the ones I know are few. Fiery Skipper, Long-tailed Skipper, we have a lot of those. The buckeye is usually up near the mailbox in the fields. We have quite a few swallowtails here.

Here's a picture I took of one in my brother's yard with my phone.



I'm not an expert on butterflies but I think this one is a Viceroy which is a mimic of a Monarch.

Animals have the property that they need food to live. And butterflies are no exception. The caterpillars in the video below only have an eye/stomach for a boxwood plant. They devour no other plant, only the boxwood. The boxwood in the video is in my mother's garden, i should say it was in my mother's garden, since the caterpillars have eaten the plant to shreds. Not a single leaf was left untouched. Not my mother, but i thought it was a very beautiful and fascinating image of how the caterpillars were feasting.

Wonderful! It's most likely Phoebis sennae (not sure of your general location though, so this could be wrong)

This is a Gulf Fritillary (Dione vanillae)

Fenn, great IDs. I’m in south central Florida. I rarely see the yellow sulfurs close enough to ID by markings. They fly so high and don’t rest often at human level. That cat was on senna.

I am fond of gulf fritillaries. There aren’t as many here as when I lived further south.

Mew!



Small Tortoiseshell, from last month. It wasn't a great summer for butterflies here: very little except for Large Whites and Speckled Woods.

I made a new friend yesterday, The Mournful Sphinx (Enyo lugubris)

A picture/book to set my hero Charles Darwin in the spotlights

Lovely, sleepy sphinx moth! I like that family. Got interested in moths after rescuing some kind of hawkmoth at work about ten years ago. I don't know the species, but it was huge- a good 5cm across. I scooped it up between rubber-gloved hands, but by the time I got to the door it had wriggled out without me noticing and was just calmly sitting on my thumb!

Not a moth, but this was found in a display at the Kansas State Fair this year:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nat ... 314491002/

The boy who entered it got a blue ribbon on the display.

Sphingids are super friendly. Definitely one of my favorite families!

Is this a hummingbird?



Close, but no! It's a hummingbird moth!

Macroglossum stellatarum I think? Also in the Sphingidae family (like the photos I posted above)

Five years ago was in the city of Domburg. Just behind the dunes i came across a butterfly that was rare for me. In terms of color and shape it reminded me of a kite, a yellow mini kite. In a way it was a mini kite, luckily for this mini kite he/she was not tied to a rope, as there were many trapped a few dozen meters on the beach. The photo below is of that encounter with the butterfly in question.

My lysDexic friend refers to them as "Flutterbys".