We Brake for Butterflies

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many congregations of swallowtails on our road at one time. The image above shows only part of one patch, and there were watering holes all up and down the lane from barn to bend, each with 20 to more than 50 * yellow male tiger swallowtails exclusively (a yellow phase female might have slipped in while the guys were tanking up). So I figured maybe there was a sports-bar atmosphere going on here.

But there has also been smaller numbers of smaller dark-coppery butterflies I haven’t stopped in the sprinkles to identify, also puddling–crescents, admirals–I’ll pay more attention today.

The camera can’t capture the image–much less the feeling–when they flush from their places on the road to swirl like so much living confetti in a whirlwind of wings, from shade to sun, haphazard, loopy circles to soon return to the same or a nearby spot where some essential, or delicious substance exudes from the ordinary looking seeps and puddles on our road.

We consider the daily butterfly celebration just one of our amenities, but we don’t take it for granted. Not everybody is so honored to have aerial decorations so many summer days.

For the longest time, I thought the blue-black ones were spicebush swallowtails. There is such a thing and it looks similar to both the (do-not-eat poisonous) PIPEVINE swallowtail AND to the dark phase female TIGER swallowtails. I pulled images of all of them together, and even though it got reduced for the Posterous page, you can take a look, then pay more attention next time you see a dark swallowtail, realizing it could be one of a number of dark species or sexual forms.