Tag: butterfly
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Dead Things
Trigger Warning — I show photos of a couple of dead animals in this post, as well as talk about depressing things. If you’d rather not read on, I won’t hold it against you. This has been such a weird, extreme summer in so many ways — extreme heat over most of the continent, fires…
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Pollinator Week — Butterflies
It’s Pollinator Week! Pollinators are animals that pollinate plants. As my friend TZ at Notes in Nature (https://notes-in-nature.org/2022/06/20/pollinators/) explains, the group includes bats, birds, and bugs of all sort. This includes butterflies. Butterflies are incredible pollinators, visiting flowers of every type, in all sorts of environments. Western Swallowtails are some of the most common butterfly…
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Butterflies
Usually, butterflies are hard to photograph. They are wary creatures, and when you turn the big eye of your camera at them, they take off, flying erratically away. But this week, I’ve been lucky to get some photos of butterflies I’ve never shot before — in some cases, I’ve never heard of before. Case in…
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Butterflies Galore
I’m not really an expert on butterflies. But while hiking recently in the Front Range foothills , I saw so many of such varied species that I had to check into them a bit more. All these different butterflies are from just one hike. Females lay single eggs near violets. Caterpillars do not feed, but…
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Swallowtail Butterflies
Several weeks ago, we had orange and black Monarch butterflies migrating through the Front Range. They seem to have moved on. But we’ve still got big butterflies in the area — yellow and black swallowtails. I’ve seen two different types of swallowtails. The western tiger swallowtail is lives along waterways and in woodlands, as well…
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Painted Ladies Part Two
After seeing thousands of painted lady butterflies a couple of weeks ago, I thought they were done for the season.Painted Ladies migrate across North America! Wrong! There are still so many migrating through the Denver area, that, when they fly a bit higher, they are visible on radar! How cool is that?
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Painted Ladies migrate across North America!
This morning, my husband and I stepped out of our house to walk our dogs, and were mobbed by Painted Lady butterflies! There were dozens in our yard, sipping nectar from sunflowers and oregano. As we walked through the neighborhood, the numbers increased. They were everywhere. Delightful! Painted ladies are on every continent except Australia…
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Bees and Butterflies
Our neighbors behind us are turning their backyard into a farm. They have a garden. They have chickens. They have fruit trees. This year, they added honey bees. We, on the other hand, have always had a hummingbird garden that attracts all sorts of pollinators, including bees. One of the plants that planted itself and…
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Mathematical Patterns in Plants
One of the things that I really enjoy about nature is that it produces proofs that it obeys natural laws in the most unusual — and beautiful — ways. This spring and early summer I ran across three examples of math in plants. Scorpianweed, like most plants in the hydrophyllaceae family, has a flower stalk…
Amy Law, Science Geek 