Our butterfly bush gets numerous visitors as butterflies emerge. The garden also gets the occasional dragonfly who snatches small flying insects in the air and devours them. So far, we’ve had about six species of butterflies and three species of dragonflies.
butterflies
Butterflies have scaly wings, hence their name in Latin, lepidoptera. So if one flies into your house and you need to free it, be gentle. If you rub off the scales, you’ll be left with a very drab insect.
Moths are the (generally) nocturnal branch of the lepidoptera. They’re (generally) not as colorful as butterflies, although spinx moths can be quite impressive, and some are so large they can be confused with hummingbirds – although hummingbirds don’t fly at night.
Caterpillars are very finicky, to the pont where they’d rather go extinct than eat something other than their normal food plant. So, if you want to increase your local butterfly population, you’ll need to plant their food plants in sufficient quantity to feed hungry caterpillars. Planting the right thing may not be enough: we have some no doubt very tasty stands of native milkweed yet have yet to see a monarch butterfly or caterpillar.
Common butterflies
Gulf fritillaries (Agraulis vanillae). They’re not closely related to temperate zone true fritillaries. They belong to a tropical family of butterflies (Heliconiinae, in case you were wondering) that have interesting shapes and often transparent wings in the tropics. We get a mimic that looks kind of like a bad-tasting monarch. They’re smaller than monarchs and their wing beats are much more rapid. Their food plant is passion vine, something we don’t have in the garden.
Painted ladies (Vanessa cardui) These are not so common in the garden as in the deserts, where they drift across the landscape in great numbers.
They tend to fly rapidly about, then suddenly land and fold up their wings, effectively disappearing.
Swallowtails
Three species of swallowtails live around here. Theoretically, we have food plants for all of them. That doesn’t mean we’ll have caterpillars, however.
Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor) Our pipevine is all chewed up, so it looks like the pipevine swallowtails found it this year. We saw a caterpillar looking for a place to pupate, quite a distance from the vine. Hopefully we’ll have several broods of butterflies!
Western Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio rutulus). This is our big, bold, beautiful black and yellow butterfly that floats majestically through the garden. We’ve never seen a caterpillar, but since they feed on trees, that’s not unusual.
Anise Swallowtail (Papilio zelicaon). Like a smaller version of the tiger swallowtail, perhaps not as common for some reason. The caterpillars feed on fennel, something that grows all along the American river parkway, and in our garden. They might feed on other things in the carrot family, too – but so far no caterpillars on either our fennel nor our carrots.
Dragonflies (odonata)
These insects pass their larval stage in water, where they devour pretty much anything they can catch. We may have some in the pond, but since the larvae look like bits of waterlogged wood, they’re hard to see unless you drain the pond. Not worth disturbing everything just for curiosity!
Although we call them all dragonflies, odonata specialists give them more unique names. Most around here are types of skimmers, although we get a lot more variety in the wetlands: meadowhawks, dashers, darners, pondhawks…
Then there are damselflies, that like dragonflies are called something else: bluets. That’s also the name of a flower in French. Confusing!