Butterflies

[gurdonark]

I've been spending a great deal of time with Ortho's book, "All about Attracting Hummingbirds and Butterflies". I love looking at the pictures of swallowtails, zebras, sulphurs, and frittaries.
I really like that cabbages and sulphurs are so
attractive and yet so abundant here. I was excited that Lake Ray Roberts, about an hour from here, had lots of zebras last year. I remember the summer before my sophomore year of high school, when I had to collect butterflies for a
biology class butterfly box. In our part of Arkansas, the Zebra Swallowtail was an extremely elusive catch. It had gorgeous black and white coloring, and the distinctive swordtail
wings. Once, at the church camp Camp Tanako I attended each year (I have always said that church camp and baseball camp were excellent educations in man's petty inhumanity to man), I saw a giant Zebra Swallowtail floating slowly from place to place. I had no butterfly net; but there was the prize....now the 'zebras' at Lake Ray Roberts
are an altogether different creature, blacks and oranges striped horizontally, not whites and blacks striped vertically. Either species can make a hike into a memory. I hope we can plant some butterfly friendly things this year, and refrain from pesticides in the yard so that they'll come and flit about here. I think I'll go for a walk today, to see the spring butterflies flutter by.

Comments

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

I love butterflies (duh! is there anyone who doesn't?)--and the zebra swallowtails are really gorgeous. I was always pining to spot a giant luna moth.

luna moths

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

when I was a kid growing up, the local baseball field always drew huge lunas with its night lights...it was more fun to watch the moths than the games.....

just returned from a walk...a red admiral, cabbages, sulphurs, a tiger swallowtail and a black swallowtail...I can hardly wait for summer.