Last month, I finally managed a decent snapshot (still not a great picture) of the Polydamas Swallowtail (Battas polydamas) butterflies that enjoy our pipevine:
I still haven’t been able to get the entire animal in focus, but at least it’s better than some of my previous attempts:
These guys just love our Aristolochia vine; I’ve seen half a dozen in flight at once on the side of our house when the weather’s nice and the season’s right. These days, they’re not flying so much anymore, and I haven’t seen any eggs in a few weeks, either.
As you can see from the background in the blurry shot above, they don’t have anything against Hamelia patens (our native south Florida firebush), but since it’s not their larval food, they don’t tend to congregate near it in anything like the numbers you’ll get with the pipevines.
Speaking of pipevines, I’m pretty sure that ours is Aristolochia gigantea, but I haven’t compared ours to the other varieties carefully enough to be absolutely sure. It’s got honking big flowers, though:
Some common names for these species are Dutchman’s pipe and calico flower. The pipe from the shape of the flower, obviously, and the calico from the coloration. Here endeth the lesson.
I appreciate you having a tag Lepidoptera. If I manage to get into my photos dumps and do a better job tagging I’ll be using it too.
There’s nowhere else to deposit this anecdote, so here you go. I was shooting a video documentary once. I was creeping through the woods in southern Ohio’s Appalachian mountains looking for wildlife. I really wanted something compelling to make the case this little patch of scraggly second-growth was worth saving (and it was, and we did).
Anyway, there in the distance in the woods is a Luna moth on the ground. I think I ran over one once before at night in a car, and that was as close as I’d come. If I really think back on it, this incident happened within a couple months of the time I realized I’d unavoidably killed one while driving.
So I had a video camera, and held my breath as I creeped closer… and closer… and closer….
Yeah, it was dead. I spent a good 10-15 minutes “sneaking up” on a dead moth. Brilliant.
Be vewy vewy quiet. I’m hunting rabbits!
I suppose we shouldn’t feel too bad, though: the ONLY shots of some butterfly species in the “…Through Binoculars” series are of roadkilled specimens. I don’t have the books handy at the moment, but there were more than a few species, as I recall…