Category: lepidopterans

No readers’ wildlife today; instead, we have my own photos from 2004-2006

February 26, 2026 • 9:15 am

Sadly, the tank has run dry.  To proffer some content today, I’ve dug into my personal photo bank and will post a few miscellaneous shots with brief captions. Click to enlarge the photos

Galápagos marine iguana, Amblyrhynchus cristatus, 2010:

Same trip, baby Galápagos sea lion, Zalophus wollebaeki:

Woman collecting land snails for dinner, São Tomé, 2004:

BBQ dinner at City Market, Luling, Texas, 2004. Brisket, sausage, and the trimmings (beans, potato salad, and the mandatory white bread):

Death Valley and a rare post-rain desert bloom, 2005.  Where do the insects come from since these blooms occur only about once a decade?  (If you can ID the lepidopteran, do so.)

Usually there is only saltbush and creosote growing on the land, but in a bloom all sorts of flowers emerge from dormant seeds:

A rare Jewish cowboy, photo in the Eastern California Museum in Independence. The last time I went the photo was gone and nobody knew about it or even remembered it. I’d kill to have it:

Mugging in the Alabama Hills, California:

Doing flies, 2005. This is what I spent most of my time doing before I retired.

Flying onto a glacier at Denali (Mt. McKinley).  They were dropping off two climbers in a four-seater bush plane, and I hitched a ride there and back. I got to sit next to the woman pilot. From Talkeetna, Alaska. The peak in the center is Denali.

After we landed on the snow-covered glacier, the pilot had to make a runway to take off from, going back and forth on the snow about ten times to pack it down:

The famous polymorphism of color and banding within the snail Cepaea nemoralis, studied intensively by evolutionary geneticists for years. Despite that work and subsequent population-genetic analysis, we still don’t understand the significance of the variation. For some reason the field was covered with snails; these were on a fencepost. Dorset, England, 2006:

The cottage where poet and author Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and grew up. Upper Brockhampton, Dorset, 2006.

When Hardy became famous and wealthy, he moved to a house he designed (also in Dorset), Max Gate, where he lived from 1885 until he died in 1928.  In the garden by the house are the burial sites of his beloved dogs and cats.  Here are two graves of his cats, Snowdove and Kitsy; I was told that they were inscribed by Hardy himself, who had worked as a stonemason when younger, but I can’t vouch for that story:

A draft manuscript of the famous novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles  in Hardy’s hand (taken at the local museum):

T. E. Lawrence‘s (1888-1935) final residence the cottage called Clouds Hill. He lived here after he gave up his fame as “Lawrence of Arabia” and served in the RAF under the pseudonym “T. E. Shaw” beginning in 1935, commuting back and forth to the airbase on his motorcycle.  The cottage was very spartan, and had no electricity. As Wikipedia notes,

In a 1934 letter to Francis Rodd, Lawrence (who had changed his surname to Shaw) described his home thus:[5]

“The cottage has two rooms, one, upstairs, for music (a gramophone and records) and one downstairs for books. There is a bath in a demi-cupboard. For food one goes a mile, to Bovington (near the Tank Corps Depot) and at sleep time I take a great sleeping bag… and spread it on what seems the nicest floor… The cottage looks simple outside, and does no hurt to its setting which is twenty miles of broken heath and a river valley filled with rhododendrons run wild. I think everything, inside and outside my place, approaches perfection… Yours ever, T. E. Shaw”

Lawrence had an education in the classics, and is one of my heroes as he was both a man of action and a man of learning. Here’s the inscription in Greek over the door above: οὐ φροντὶς (“why worry”), taken from Hippoclides.

Lawrence’s bathtub and shaving mirror:

Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash on May 13, 1935, soon after leaving the RAF. Heading home on his motorcycle, he didn’t see two boys on bicycles ahead of him because of a dip in the road. Swerving to avoid them at the last moment, he crashed his bike, sustained a serious head injury, and died six days later.  A study of his death by a neurosurgeon who tended the dying Lawrence eventually led to the use of helmets by motorcyclists.

The crash site is a km or two from Clouds Hill, and my friend and I scoured the road on foot looking for the crash site, now marked by a memorial (I saw no dip in the road). We finally found the stone:

Ironically, there had been a car crash at the site right before we found the memorial:

When he crashed, Lawrence was riding a Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle. Here’s a picture of him from Wikipedia riding one (clearly not the death vehicle) that he called “George V”. If you go to Clouds Hill, you’ll see several of his motorcycles in a small garage. 

Lawrence on George V, Wikimedia Commons, author unknown

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 14, 2026 • 8:30 am

These are the last photos I have, and I’ve gathered singletons in a potpourri of photos. Please send me any good wildlife photos you have—otherwise there will be a LACUNA tomorrow. Captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

From Pratyaydipta Rudra in Oklahoma.

This is a Pine Squirrel [Tamiascirus sp.], photographed in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO.

From Adrian:

Here’s a picture of a European Pine Marten (Martes martes) from the shores of Loch Duich, near the Isle of Skye, Scotland:

From Guy:

Taken in Lake Saint Clair Metropark in Michigan a few years back by my 12 year old son Nolan at a bird-banding station where we volunteer. I think it’s a Blackpoll Warbler (Setophaga striata) with the image taken in the fall (so I don’t really know if it’s male or female):

From Robert Lang, whose house and studio burned to the ground during the California fires last year; both are being rebuilt:

Our gardener found this California native tarantula (Aphonopelma sp.) while clearing some fire debris at my former studio and, knowing that my wife had a pet tarantula and was helping the Eaton Canyon Nature Center in its fire recovery, he left it for us at our temporary home in a little plastic bottle. (Umm…the tarantula was in a little plastic bottle. Not our home.) After we determined that ECNC didn’t have a place for one yet, we released it locally, but I took this picture before it wandered away.
When we got home from the release, there was another plastic bottle on the porch with another tarantula inside.

A Hummingbird Moth (species unknown) from Marty Riddle:

The Hawk Moths, aka Hummingbird Moth, love the nectar in resident maintained gardens at Brooksby Village Peabody, Massachusetts:

And a cat/bird encounter from Barry Lyons:

For years now, I’ve had mourning doves  [Zenaida macroura] alight on my air conditioner. Some of them are regulars, and what interests me is that they haven’t taken the next obvious step: pecking at the window.
What I mean is that a dove arrives and then stares into my apartment, sometimes moving its head back and forth: “Are you in there? Ah, there you are!” And then I get up from my chair and go feed them.
But when will a dove start pecking at the window to alert me that he’s there? Why hasn’t it figured out that it’s something it can do? And at no cost to his safety because he can still fly away.
And look at this photo. The dove seems to understand windows. Every time a cat goes to the window (I don’t own a cat; I cat-sit) it flares its wings instead of flying off, as if to say, “Ha ha, you can’t get me. I’m out here, you idiot.”

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 20, 2026 • 8:15 am

Regular Mark Sturtevant (as opposed to Irregular Mark Sturtevant) has sent in some lovely insect photos to fill the nearly-empty reserve of pictures. Please send any good wildlife photos you have. Thanks!

Mark’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Be sure to check out the female Tussock Moth caterpillar with vestigial wings (it’s the eighth photo).

Here is another dispatch of local insects and spiders, all photographed either in area parks near where I live in eastern Michigan, or as staged shots at home. Let’s start with a couple of dragonflies. First up is a Green Darner (Anax junius), which ranks pretty large among the dragonflies found here. As is almost always the case, this individual is a female, since they perch frequently and are much easier to approach than males, which I only rarely manage to photograph. Do you see the tiny yellow critter on the dragonfly? That is a Globular Springtail, and it must have walked or jumped onto the dragonfly from nearby foliage. There may be a few more of them in the picture as well, though I’m not certain. Springtails are tiny soil arthropods, and they are extremely abundant. When seen up close, Globular Springtails are arguably adorable, as you can see in the linked image. I’ve searched for them for some time but have only rarely encountered them, despite claims that they are exceedingly common. Perhaps our local species spends more time up on foliage rather than in the soil, meaning I’ve been looking in the wrong places!:

The next dragonfly is a male Skillet Clubtail (Gomphurus ventricosus), named for the large, pan-like club on the end of its abdomen. I have to drive a few hours south to a particular park to see them, and of course this one is perching on poison ivy which covers much of the area there. That park hosts 8 or 9 species of clubtails according to a dragonfly documentation site called Odonata Central. I’ve photographed most of those species with only two left to find:

A field near my workplace has a ridiculously high population of Chinese Praying Mantids (Tenodera sinensis). I suspect this is the lingering result of someone having released a large number of egg cases several years ago, combined with a robust population of grasshopper prey. Shown here is a young June nymph. I can return later in the summer to find several large adults in no time at all:

Next up are some lepidopterans. First is a Hackberry Emperor butterfly (Asterocampa celtis). They are often common along forest margins where their host Hackberry trees [Celtis occidentalis] are concentrated. Their caterpillars, however, seem to be quite secretive, as I’ve seen only a few of them:

Next is an inchworm caterpillar, though I don’t have an identification for it. Do you see the tiny mites?:

The insect shown next is a moth, although it makes a very convincing wasp mimic. This is the Eupatorium Borer Moth (Carmenta bassiformis). The larvae feed on the roots of Ironweed and Joe Pye Weed, both of which are highly valued native wildflowers because they are very much favored by butterflies:

The flamboyant caterpillar in the next image is a White-marked Tussock Caterpillar (Orgyia leucostigma). I’ve tried several times to get an acceptable focus-stacked image of one of these. What makes them difficult is the combination of all those oddly angled sticky-out bits, which challenge the shallow depth of field inherent in this kind of photography, along with the fact that these caterpillars absolutely will Not Hold Still. As a result, the stacking is done on the fly, followed later by long hours of manual reassembly of the jumbled focus stack. This image is by far my most successful attempt:

I kept this caterpillar in hopes that the moth emerging from the cocoon would be a female. Why? Well—check out what came out! It was a female! Females have barely visible vestigial wings, and I had never seen one before. She will sit here, unmoving, until a male finds her. This strategy saves a great deal of energy that can instead be used for laying eggs. The winged males are unremarkable, and while I’ve probably seen them, I don’t think I’ve ever photographed one:

Finally, here are three images of jumping spiders I’ve been wanting to share together for quite some time. The Dimorphic Jumping Spider (Maevia inclemens) is a species I regularly see around the outside of our house. The name refers to the males having two distinct color morphs. The images below are manual focus stacks, photographed in staged settings on the ‘ol dining room table. First is a female with long-legged fly prey, which conveniently provides a sense of scale since the fly is about the size of a mosquito:

Next are the two male color morphs. The first somewhat resembles the females, while the other is very different and comes with distinctive hair decorations. This is an older image, but I’m bringing it back so all three forms can finally be shown together. It’s surprising that they are all the same species!

I recently learned that the two male forms use different courtship displays for females, yet are considered equally successful in the mating game. I’m sure Jerry can steer things in the right direction if I am in error here, but having different male forms with different mating strategies does not seem unusual in the animal kingdom. Examples I’m familiar with include lizards, crustaceans, and fish, although in those cases the different males include those that are aggressive and territorial, and others that win by being sneaky. But here, I don’t see how either male is territorial, and apparently both have courtship displays for females.

One of my goals for next season will be to try to document their different courtship behaviors. That seems do-able, since I can expect to find several of them again next summer.

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 10, 2026 • 8:15 am

Reader Ruth Berger sent some butterfly photos taken last year in Germany.  Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge Ruth’s photos by clicking on them.

Here are some butterflies I snapped on my walks on mostly sandy soil near the Main and Nidda rivers in and around Frankfurt, Germany, last year. I’ll start with a good picture (some of the others aren’t that good) of the small copper, Lycaena phlaeas, a holarctic species, on ragwort.

The next not so brilliant photo is of the orange tip (Anthocharis cardamines), whose males are so busy chasing females and each other at borders between patches of woodland and grassland in spring. Only the males of the species have the eponymic orange tip, here visiting the species’ major caterpillar feeding plant, Cardamine pratensis.

Unlike the males, orange tip females look much like any typical white butterfly (Pierinae) from above. The underside of the females has greenish markings similar, but not identical, to the species you see in the next picture, Pontia edusa, here shown feeding on a Centaurea flower:

I saw several species of red-spotted burnet moths this year, all members of the West Palaearctic Zygaena family. These are wondrous creatures, dressed in what looks like a blue black fur coat with a red-spotted cape on top. The following two pictures are of the most frequent species here, the 6-spot burnet moth, Zygaena filipendulae:

The next picture shows a moment from a scene I watched for around ten minutes: a male Queen of Spain fritillary (Issoria lathonia), the biggie on the left, chasing and harassing a small skipper (Thymelicus cf. sylvestris). Should any of the insect lovers here know what might be behind this behavior, please tell me:

The caterpillars of Issoria lathonia feed off Viola flowers. Below, you can see a female getting nectar from a European field pansy (Viola arvensis) in spring, showing its underside that has
silvery-white spots with a mother-of-pearl-like appearance:

Next is one of the prettier pictures, a male common blue (Polyommatus icarus):

While the males have a beautiful upper side of shiny blue (in young animals, the color can become washed out with age), the females of the German subspecies tend to be plain brown with orange spots: 

Next is a female marbled white (Melanargia galathea) , a species of the Nymphalidae family that despite its English name has nothing to do with the Pieridae family that most “whites” belong to. The females have a beige/tan hue seen from the side:

The boys are more black and white: 

And this one, shown from above, is apparently a bird-attack survivor:

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 31, 2025 • 8:15 am

Send in your photos, for it’s 2026!

Neil Taylor sent in a miscellany of photos from the UK. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

Highland Cattle:
Chip-stealing Herring Gulls (Larus argentatus) gather to mob their chosen victims! Port St. Mary, the Isle of Man.

Two photos of a zebra jumping spider (Salticus scenicus) eating a greenfly (species unidentified):

A large house spider, an Eratigena species:
A labyrinth spider (Agelena labyrinthica) in its funnel web with the remains of ladybird beetles (Coccinella septempunctata):

These photos taken in the environs of Cambridge the UK unless otherwise stated:
Bombylius major – The Large Bee Fly with its large rigid proboscis for nectar feeding:

The delicate beginnings of a wasps’ nest:

A Steatoda nobilis (false widow spider) lifting a caught and wrapped bumble bee (likely Bombus pascuorum, the Carder Bee) to its lair.

An Araneus diadematus, the European garden spider, bites a wrapped and disabled bumble bee (likely Bombus pascuorum, the Carder Bee).

Araneus diadematus, the European garden spider:

An unidentified frog – Marrakech, Morocco:
An unidentified moth – Marrakech Morocco:

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 22, 2025 • 8:30 am

Today we have more lovely butterfly photos sent in by Pratyaydipta Rudra, a statistician at Oklahoma State University, who notes that “the first twelve are photographed by me and the last two by my wife (Sreemala Das Majumder). She is a Ph.D. student in Environmental Sciences at Oklahoma State University.”  The pair has a bird-and-butterfly photo site called Wingmates. Pratyay’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. 

We have photographed many butterflies over the last couple of years, so I wanted to share on more batch of them – this time some larger ones from the family Papilionidae that are all commonly known as swallowtails.

Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes), our largest butterfly species. The flower is of Tall Thistle (Cirsium altissimum), which is native in our region:

Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes) on wild coneflower (I believe Echinacea pallida) and looking like a fancy kite! These are probably the most common breeding Swallowtails in our area. We had many caterpillars on our fennel this year:

Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor) – Gotta love these with all the beautiful iridescence. They are relatively easy to invite into your area if you have pipevine on your property. They avoid predators by being poisonous/distasteful:

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), a common migrant:

This one is also an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), but it is a dark morph female. While males are always yellow, females have two morphs – yellow and dark. It is thought that by being dark, they benefit from mimicking the distasteful Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor). This is true for some other species such as Spicebush Swallowtail (Papilio troilus), Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes), Red-spotted Purple (Limenitis arthemis) etc.:

Spicebush Swallowtail (Papilio troilus), which looks quite similar to a Black Swallowtail:

Dorsal side of the Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes):

This one is not from Oklahoma. These two Palamedes Swallowtails (Papilio Palamedes) chasing each other in the swamps of North Carolina:

Zebra Swallowtail (Eurytides marcellus), another Eastern species. Love their long tails!:

I think this image captures all the common Western swallowtail species. The one coming in and the one in front at the right are both Two-tailed Swallowtails (Papilio multicaudata). One on the left is definitely a Pale Swallowtail (Papilio eurymedon), and I think the one behind the right Two-tailed is a Western Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio rutulus), but please correct me if I am wrong. All of these congregated in this rocky area to get the necessary nutrients on a sunny day in the Rocky Mountains, of Colorado:

Another Two-tailed in flight and some others from the same area:

A black-on-black image of a Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes) hovering over garden phlox:

These last two photos are by Sreemala:

Symmetry! Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) coming in:

Yet another photo of a Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes) from our garden:

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 12, 2025 • 8:15 am

Send ’em in, please, or we’ll be empty over the holiday season.

Today’s photos of butterflies come from Pratyaydipta Rudra, a statistics professor at Oklahoma State University. Pratyay’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Pratyay and his wife Sreemala have a big bird-and-butterfly website called Wingmates.

Here are various other butterflies photographed in Oklahoma, most of them at our backyard.

Gulf Fritillary (Dione vanillae) eyeing a flower to land on, but it was already occupied by a skipper:

Variegated Fritillary (Euptoieta claudia) taking off from a cosmos:

Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia) on cosmos. These plants are hardy and attract many pollinators:

Another commoner in our area – American Lady (Vanessa virginiensis):

Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui), looks very similar to the American Lady, but one can spot the difference if they look carefully. They have the widest distribution of any butterfly, found on all continents except Antarctica and Australia:

Another Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui) on our cosmos. Mid-day harsh light is terrible for bird photography, but it can be worked around when photographing butterflies. In fact, I quite like the glow that comes from the sun hitting the butterflies from directly above:

Closeup of a Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui). They have a long “nose” (actually, elongated mouthpart), but can’t beat the American Snout (Libytheana carinenta) in this regard:

The next two images are for the readers to guess which one is an American Lady and which is a Painted Lady. Can you tell what this one is?:

What kind of Lady is this?:

Monarch (Danaus plexippus):

Viceroys (Limenitis archippus) look similar to Monarch, but they are smaller and have a black line across the hindwing that the Monarch doesn’t. They were thought to be a Batesian mimic of Monarch for a long time, but are now considered a Mullerian mimic where both species are unappealing to predators and evolve similar appearances, reinforcing predators’ avoidance of either one:

Not all butterflies visit flowers. This Question Mark butterfly (Polygonia interrogationis), for example, only visits flowers when its usual food sources – rotting fruit, plant sap, dung etc., are not easily available:

Tawny Emperors (Asterocampa clyton) have a similar diet:

Hackberry Emperor (Asterocampa celtis), another similar butterfly from the same family. They are quite common in our area:

Northern Pearly-eye (Lethe anthedon). We don’t see this one very often:

Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa), one of the most uniquely beautiful butterflies that we see here: