we found this stag beetle hiding out on a hydrangea, not flying but acting naturally, so i let it be. it was probably hiding from the rain. i can dig it. this one is big, almost 1.5" long, long, long. i don't know what it wants with the hydrangea, but i'm not about to help. that's a lot of beetle/beatle references, and yes, i know they're terrible (the puns, not the band). mean mr. mustard sgt. pepper eleanor rigby.
we've found a lot of mantises in the garden, and the more, the better. they eat lots of undesirables, which is good, plus they're just plain cool, which is great. this one is a juvenile, about a third of its eventual 5" length.
plus there's a plethora of bees, wasps, ants, other beetles, flies, etc. etc. etc. those pics are for another post. today i'm going to focus on the main attraction: butterflies. we have swarms of them. and the monarchs haven't even made their appearance yet, which is usually early september. they might have come sooner, but for some reason, the milkweed i planted never came up.
this is a checkered white butterfly, investigating the basil. they're small and very quick, and they're numerous. around here, at least.
silver spotted skipper. slightly bigger than the checkered white, but just as quick and numerous. at any one time, i count four or five on the zinnias alone. side note: zinnias are the most popular flowers in the garden for butterflies. bees prefer the sunflowers, while wasps (?!?!) like the amaranth and rudbeckia.
the big dogs of the butterfly show are the swallowtails. we thought we had two species, eastern swallowtails and black swallowtails. upon more careful examination, it turns out we have...two species, eastern swallowtails and black swallowtails. allow me to explain.
this is a male eastern swallowtail. they are relatively common around here, and they are big. they also don't mind being photographed from up close, which is nice.
we have been seeing this dude a lot, and we thought it was a black swallowtail. wrong. turns out it is a female eastern swallowtail (aka dudette), which you can tell from the two rows of yellow/orange spots low on its wings (internet research told us this, not like we knew it already). not to be confused with:
a female black swallowtail, which only has one row of yellow/orange spots on the wings. [update: after perusing a butterfly website designed to make you second-guess your previously certain butterfly IDs, i'm not totally convinced the above female butterfly IDs are accurate. hopefully they are, but considering how multiple species look virtually identical, who knows.] apparently we haven't seen any male blacks yet, which look like the male easterns if you transposed the black and yellow. but the best/craziest part was when the male eastern and female black started fighting. at first we thought male and female easterns were mating or something. but after more analysis, it was revealed to be a cross-species gender battle. fight fight fight fight fight
this went on for at least 10 minutes. i took about a million pictures, but most were junk because the butterflies were fighting all over the damn place. the garden, the sidewalk, the deck, and so on.
so that's what i've got. after downloading these pics, i went out and took some more of bees, wasps, and other pollinators. unfortunately, i forgot to put the memory card back in holli's camera, so none of those pics were actually saved. dammit. oh well, next time.
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