I’m not talking about the basketball team. I mean the butterflies that used to frequent our area, their banded, strange-looking caterpillars feasting on milkweed plants.
I attended a lecture on local butterflies at a recent California Native Plant Society (CNPS) meeting, and only one person mentioned having a caterpillar on her milkweed plants. We have lots of interesting bugs on our plant, but no caterpillars.
Then I started thinking… when did I see a monarch here? I saw a lot of their cousins, the queen butterfly – adults and caterpillars – in Arizona, but here? It’s been a while.
There are a number of other orange butterflies that resemble monarchs, but they’re not even related. These are gulf fritillaries, representatives of a tropical family that moves north where there’s a combination of passion vines for their caterpillars and warm enough temperatures in winter to keep them from freezing to death. In times past, these butterflies were extirpated every winter with cold temperatures, but lately they’ve been multiplying.
The two butterflies are easy to tell apart by looking at the photos below. Monarchs are also larger and have a different flight pattern than the fritillaries (monarchs tend to flap and glide more than flutter).
