Float Like a Butterfly

Sunday’s butterfly walk in Frick Park brought out 84 people to learn from local experts Walt and Dana Shaffer about some of these beautiful creatures that call our parks home. The sun hid behind a cloud for most of the afternoon, which made the butterflies a little less active (they get their energy from the sun as well as from food), but we still recorded 17 species in the Environmental Center area:

• Azure
• Cabbage white
• Clouded sulfur
• Eastern tailed blue
• Eastern tiger swallowtail
• Gray hairstreak
• Great spangled fritillary
• Hackberry emperor
• Monarch
• Painted lady
• Pearl crescent
• Peck’s skipper
• Red spotted purple
• Silver spotted skipper
• Spicebush swallowtail
• Zabulon skipper

Here are some photos from the day, along with a few older photos of the species we saw just to give you a closer look.

Here’s the group around the lovely garden full of zinnias planted by campers at the Environmental Center.  There were several butterflies frequenting the flowers.

We quickly began spotting pearl crescents, which have orange wings with black borders and an intricate pattern of markings.

Walt and his wife Dana caught most of the butterflies we studied in depth with their nets, and then Walt held them up for us or put them in small containers (we learned a great new use for old cassette cases!).  He encouraged folks doing their own butterfly studies to try and observe from a distance if possible, because whenever you touch a butterfly you rub some of the scales off its wings.  We let all the butterflies go when everyone had had a chance to see them.  This is another pearl crescent that Walt captured.

Another orange to tan butterfly, the great spangled fritillary, is the most common fritillary in the eastern United States.  Fritillaries are brush-footed butterflies, which means their tiny front legs lack claws (did you know most butterflies have claws?  I did not!).  One fritillary a lot of people know is the viceroy, which resembles the monarch.  We didn’t see one of those on Sunday, though.

This one is a silver spotted skipper.  Skippers are different from “true” butterflies in several ways: they tend to move a little faster and fly more erratically, they have larger bodies relative to their wings, and their antennae are hooked.

Monarchs, which are perhaps the most recognizable of the butterflies, are also the only ones to make a lengthy, two-way migration each year.  Many butterflies make a southern migration in the fall but don’t return in the spring.  Monarchs that emerge in the fall make the trip south and back north again, and then their descendents often head back to the very same places the following fall.  I thought the amazing differential in lifespan among monarchs was very interesting: the ones that emerge in the spring and summer often live for about two weeks, while the ones emerging in the fall can live from 6-8 months (mostly “hibernating” in trees).

We had lots of budding photographers on the walk the other day!

The red spotted purple is blue to blue-green and has iridescent hindwings.  The male and female of this species are identical except that the female is slightly larger.

One of our butterfly enthusiasts encourages a Peck’s skipper to fly away.

The painted lady butterfly is another orange butterfly with black wing borders, but you can distinguish it from the others based on the white spots on the tips of its forewings.

A couple of different kinds of swallowtails: the spicebush, which have black wings with iridescent spots on their hind wings (bright green on the male and blue on the female), and the bright yellow Eastern tiger swallowtail.  Something interesting that we learned is that female Eastern tiger swallowtails have both a yellow form and a dark form (black wings, but still with the blue spots).  Sounds like they would be very easy to misidentify!

Walt and Dana spent a little time trying to capture a hackberry emperor butterfly, which lives on (you guessed it) hackberry trees.  Once we found a stand of hackberry trees, it didn’t take long to spot these butterflies, which fly quickly and are very territorial.  Walt predicted they’d fly straight at him as well as menace some nearby tiger swallowtails, which they did.  They were much too quick to get a good close-up, unfortunately!

I didn’t see this clouded sulfur until the end of the day, when I passed back by the garden full of zinnias.  It certainly fits in with the bright flowers!  These butterflies like to feed on members of the pea family, like clovers and alfalfa.

Kind of makes me want to go out and look for more butterflies just to see what I can find!  Good places to look are meadows and swampy areas (Walt and Dana found several more species in the Nine Mile Run area later that afternoon).  Butterflies love wildflowers, so the closer you are to them, the more likely you are to see a butterfly.

Thanks so much to Walt, Dana, and everyone else who came out for the afternoon!  We got such a great response to this walk that we’re planning to schedule even more themed walks, so stay tuned for those.