FUKUSHIMA CAUSED MUTANT BUTTERFLIES

http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2012/08/fukushima-caused-mutant-butterflies-2452282.html

WEEDKILLERS AND BUTTERFLY POPULATIONS

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/01/BAUU1NR4OH.DTL

(In addition, mowing wildflowers in flower, instead of allowing them to mature. The mowers just went through today and cut all the blooming wildflowers off the county road and the smaller streets in my community. Not even the local Audubon Society could sway them. They will do the same when the butterfly migrations begin in late August. Bay County, FL)

FOR THE KIDS - A GREAT BUTTERFLY SITE AND A GREAT WAY TO TEACH THEM ABOUT BUTTERFLIES, THEIR LIFE CYCLE AND MIGRATION

http://www.kidsbutterfly.org/

I just sent this site to my son and daughter-in-law and her mother, who is a butterfly fancier.

If you catch the photos on the Red Bubble widget above, you will see my latest "catch", a Polydamus swallowtail on the plant clerodendrum. The butterflies (so few this year) are eating and getting ready for migration now. A great time to introduce the children to this most beautiful insect.

If you have roadside wildflowers that haven't been mowed, or have a field in which the late wildflowers are blooming, just take a walk into it, stand there for 10 minutes and really look at what is around you. Down under your feet, up to your knees, your waist, eye level, above your head. You don't need a net. You just need to look and take a camera and a kid with you.

Talk about what you see, take a picture and when you get back home, identify these marvels on the net.

This is my private heaven - to steal some time wherever I am and just observe, take photos, watch for the small dramas unfold (that green spider with the sloppy web is out to pounce on a butterfly, a moth, a carpenter bee, a wasp - and she'll get him).

9 SURPRISING USES FOR BEER (INCLUDING A BUTTERFLY ATTRACTANT)

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/9-surprising-uses-for-beer.html?&page=2

Butterfly site - Publish your photos!

http://www.gardenswithwings.com/index.html

The Butterfly (and Moth) Cookbook

If butterflies and moths excite you, and following them around the yard results in less than perfect shots, then maybe you should try some "non-plant" baiting (or sugaring). I have collected these recipes from the web and from people on various butterfly and moth lists. Your spectacular images, if you want to share them with me at your sugaring stations, will be placed here in later entries.

February 12, 2008. I told you Spring is nearly here!

Been out paddling a few times lately, and the creek banks are coming to life. See? Winter is just a period of well needed rest for the earth. I never think of winter as a time of death; just a time of
renewal. We all need to sleep in one way or another, and when you think of earth as a living thing - the soil is alive, under our feet, the lava boils. Life, action, mysteries.

The trees are beginning to bud and flower. Aquatic plants are reaching for the sunlight. I saw two waterlilies in bloom today. Egrets in pairs, signs of a new beaver dam being built, Coots - too many to count, wood ducks in pairs flying. Wasps, I found, inhabit a huge cypress snag - it stands tall and straight...and full of wasps! Tiny little turtles come to sun on exposed stumps. Carolina jessamine vines are beginning to flower.

A swallowtail butterfly fluttered through the yard. Robins have eaten the pyracantha berries.

The Four and Twenty Club are here again. They are a huge mixed flock of visiting Redwing Blackbirds, Common blackbirds and grackles who raid my squirrel and bird feeders. It's ok with me. I love to hear them.

Wait a minute. Did I say, "butterflies" here? If I get it right, there will be another album of butterflies and moths common to this area. Most are on native wildflowers. Can you tell me which are which? Of course you can! They're labeled! There are a couple that are unique because they are visitors or rarely seen here. The Harvester is the only butterfly with a carnivorous caterpillar. Some are camouflaged with eyespots; bright colors ward away predators as unhealthy to eat. Our butterfly season starts in August and runs through the last of October. By November, the migrant stragglers stop off for nectar but the migrations are over, for the most part.

I love my butterflies, and I encourage everyone to leave a spot in the garden for the weeds and wildflowers. And that is the purpose for this slideshow. All the plants are natives. (Weeds are wildflowers, too.) As I correct this entry, it is February 15. The redbud is full of tightly closed buds, but showing pink, anyway. Just an update!

Of Butterflies and Roadside Woes

The following was published in our local newspaper, the Panama City News Herald. Out of this came an invitation from Dr. Neil Lamb of the local Audubon Society. Out of the presentation came a meeting today with the Florida DOT, Audubon, Master Gardeners, PC Womens Club, Panama City Garden Club and other interested parties. We're going to see if we can keep our roadsides neat, safe and pretty and at the same time, give the creatures that live in and from wildflowers happy, too.

My neighbor generously shares her canal-side dock with me. It’s where I go to feed fish, observe the lilypad highway and hunt with my camera. The morning before yesterday, I spotted the beautiful caterpillar of Eumorpha fasciatus, a large, elegantly patterned moth. However, its caterpillar, grazing on its host plant, a type of mallow at the water’s edge, is incredible in color; a bright, mosaic pattern of black, yellow and red. It’s big; as long and as wide as a man’s index finger and totally harmless. I always call them “jazzy”.

“Aha,” I thought to myself. “I will photograph it in the late afternoon when the light is just right.”

I took my walk late that day, and noticed a lawn care truck parked in front of my neighbor’s yard. She’s had knee surgery, and hasn’t been able to keep it the way she wants. But it looks neat-as-a-pin to me. Maybe a little too neat, in my opinion. But it’s her yard.

I never went back that day, but I was up early to catch the soft morning light, camera in hand, to photograph “my” caterpillar.

Weed eaters had totally destroyed the fringe of tall grasses and aquatic plants that stood at the foot of the bank. Gone were the duck potatoes, the pickerel weed, the mallow with the fluorescent yellow flower and red-striped leaves that was home and diner to the caterpillar.

Fragments of vegetation lay on the bank and floated in the water. There was no trace of the caterpillar. Without its host plant, it could not survive anyway.

One of my hobbies is photographing insects; what you normally would not notice, except for the obvious ones, like butterflies and dragonflies, and maybe wasps, thinking all are dangerous.

So saddened by the destruction of the caterpillar, I stood in my yard, which I can proudly say is not “neat-as-a-pin”. It’s just the way I want it. On my circle, only my neighbor to the east feels the way I do. Your weeds are my wildflowers.

In my favorite wildflower (Bidens alba, a plant merrily blooming right now along the roadside in bushy patches of white daisy-like flowers), is a flower wasp with the interesting habit of keeping its second pair of legs raised up over its head. Click. Its image is on my memory stick. So is the beautiful orange, black and white Ailanthus web moth. Click. A common sulphur flies by me. I check my watch. Right on time. Sulphurs start moving here around 10 or 11 in the morning, but their favorite flowers are trumpet shaped and they are not blooming in my yard this year. Gulf Fritillaries – you’ve seen them – orange with flashing silver spots on their underwings are now coming to the Bidens. A little later comes a Monarch, steadying itself on the small white flowers.

Did you notice something this year? There are barely any wildflowers lining our ditches or the roads. There are patches of Bidens, but not many, because the mowers are destroying them. But that’s not only what they are destroying in the swath of stubble they leave behind.

The butterflies are migrating now. If you have ever noticed, most arrive in August, on their way to south Florida and beyond, and even into Mexico. Even more than Monarchs, the Gulf Fritillaries are desperate for food as they fly south. They need Bidens for nectar, and other natives on which to lay their eggs, if they lay multiple broods. If the plants are mowed when they are blooming, they cannot set seed. If they can’t reseed, they will eventually disappear. And so will the other species dependent on them. The mowers don’t see the drama of life hidden in the leaves and flowers of Bidens and wild morning glories, mahogany vine, and the other plants which insects need to complete their life cycles. The predators, from ants to damselflies, grasshoppers, toads to snakes and lizards, to birds, all benefit from these native wildflowers.

Several years ago, Claude Duncan, then of the News Herald, wrote a column about Monarch migration, following the golden highway. There is virtually no “gold” this year.

I have photographs taken four or five years ago, when masses of golden flowers, and spires of lavendar Liatris grew in our ditches. What happened? Drought complicates things, but mowing is sure to devastate a natural, and naturally beautiful resource if it is done at the wrong time.

I posted the short version of this to one of my butterfly lists – The International Lepidopterist Society. The response has been quite something and I have found that in some communities where mowing kept the wildflowers down, public comment has persuaded the city fathers to halt the mowing until the flowers are gone. In addition, it was suggested to me that I bring this issue to the attention of the local newspaper, and go on from there. Is it possible for the municipalities and the Florida DOT (who plants wild seed to bloom in spring – NOT in butterfly season), to mow AFTER the flowers are gone? Mission, Texas has a butterfly festival.

Maybe we could have one here? We don’t have a butterfly house – a festival would be so much easier.

After reading this, you may feel this is much ado about nothing. But if you feel that way, I ask you to take this challenge. Find a spot where Bidens alba grows. Stand there in the middle of the patch and be still. Just watch what unfolds. You will see butterflies – Common and West Indian Buckeyes, Gulf Fritillaries, American Painted Ladies (if you’re lucky), Monarchs and sometimes, the several varieties of swallowtails. You will see the skippers. They are easily identified by their somewhat plainer colors, big eyes and small size. They are everywhere. The wasps, solitary bees and bumblebees won’t bother you at all. They are nectaring. Some predatory wasps who are thin-waisted and shiny, iridescent black with unusual coloration in their wings, are not only nectaring, but hunting for insects to bring to a tunnel dug in the sand, where the egg is laid on the stunned, unlucky insect for the larvae to eat. Did you know there are nectar-eating mosquitoes that don’t sting? Well, now you do. Or that some species of flies we think of as “dirty”, take advantage of the nectar in these plants, too?

You may see a flower, crab or a green lynx spider catch and kill a bumblebee many times its size; or see one take a butterfly or moth. Day flying micro moths, some rare, are hiding on the undersides of leaves, and your footsteps through the flowers will disturb them.

Yesterday I took my camera out on CR 2301 and a boy on rollerblades came up to me and asked what I was doing.

.I explained and told him why I thought it was worthwhile. He was a student at Waller Elementary. We watched and talked for a good half hour. I spoke about the obvious – the beauty of the insects, this small environmental niche and why it was important. I told him the names of what was flying. Did he ever see a fuzzy, orange bumblebee with green eyes? It was nectaring in the Bidens just inches away. He was afraid of wasps – one had stung him once.
But here he stood beside me, beads of sweat on our foreheads (I could have been his grandmother), and he became so absorbed and unafraid, that he didn’t want to leave.

Maybe he’ll be the one to point out the eyespots on a Buckeye’s wings and tell them what they’re for or tell someone about pollen baskets on a bee or describe the color of a Fiery Skipper.

Maybe you’ll read this, and be curious enough to find one of these patches before it’s mowed. When you return, surprised at what you’ve seen, you might even pick up the phone
and tell a friend. And then maybe, you’ll make a call to ask that the mowers be silenced just until the flowers have gone, and in that simple act, you may have saved a butterfly or two.

Here's a roadside wildflowers (not all of them) a mower might encounter. It's rather long, but it's pretty.

I know this guy named Craig...

He lives in Arkansas. Found him on PBase. Let me tell you - he's on his way to becoming a
world class photographer of wildflowers, and his specialty takes him outdoors every day, searching the woods. He's putting together collages which should be posters for the state and part of developing an eco-tourism program. (How's THAT, Craig!) If you'd like to visit his website, here it is: http://www.pbase.com/cmf46/index_of_arkansa_native_wildflowers

I love wildflowers, too. Because our winter's been mild, there are still a few patches of stubborn Bidens alba, that reliable little plant that frosts our summer and fall roadsides, and gives sustenance to all manner of insects. It is ruthlessly mowed by the county which apparently doesn't believe people really like wildflowers on the sides of the road. This one plant guides the migrations of the Monarchs, the Gulf Fritillaries, provides food for aphids, ladybugs, moths, butterflies, flower wasps, the nectaring mosquitoes (didn't know that, did you), all sorts and sizes of bees, beeflies. In turn, small predators like green lynx spiders and anoles hunt there. It's a remarkable, prolific plant. Some in my yard have become perennial. They have a tenacious little seed, hooked at both ends.

One wildflower, above, that has had me stumped for nearly a year got identified by the UF Herbarium just last week. It is a skullcap, Scutellaria integrifolia, and it is incredibly beautiful. The color is stunning, and it likes its feet wet. I have found a few plants in ditches and just a couple in an untended yard on Bayou George. There is a lot to be said for not mowing right down to the water. Which prompted me last year to write a piece that got into the local newspaper.
The caterpillar of the Banded Sphinx Moth is vividly colored, intricately patterned, and lives
on a specific host plant with a yellow flower (Ludweigia decurrens, the Wingstem Water Primrose), which grows in seeps, water's edge and in wet ditches. Again, a plant with a penchant for wet feet. My neighbor is terrified of snakes. I found a caterpillar at water's edge one night in summer and decided to return the next day to photograph it. She had hired a lawn service, and they had just scoured her creek bank down to nothing, and reached out into the water. I was devastated.

That yellow, green, red and black caterpillar is the one I'm talking about.

I guess the point of this post is to ask you to set aside one spot in your yard and let whatever grows - even if you consider it a weed - grow undisturbed and see what happens. The most barren part of your yard is your lawn. Nothing grows in a well kept lawn. Cut back on your use of pesticides and fertilizers just a little, or entirely; consider xeriscaping. Watch your little wild plot. Spend some time each day observing who visits; who lives there. I have a feeling you'll be very pleased. It's a good place for the children, too.



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