Terpsichore

Brigitte named our presumably last Black Swallowtail this season Terpsichore—quite intuitively, I might add, because she’d forgotten how to tell a female from a male of this species, Papilio polyxenes. But she’d picked right. Terpsichore is a lady. The distinctive markings here are the white, indeed almost yellow, spots on the wings, tails, and the rear of the body and the distinctive and rather large blue markings on the tail reading up to the “eyes.”

The males, by contrast, shown on the left, have much more pronounced and more yellow markings; the blue spots, however, are quite small.

We found Terpsichore on some parsley we’d grown. The parsley was right next to a veritable forest of dill, which Black Swallowtails evidently prefer; but they like parsley as well. Brigitte had asked for a bunch for cooking. She had it in a glass jar on the windowsill awaiting the time for its use. And there, reaching for them, she noticed with delight that a caterpillar had grown large enough to detect. This was about the end of September—in a way quite late. We wondered if the butterfly would develop this season or whether, as we’d experienced at the old house with another late batch, it would wait until Spring to emerge from its pupa once she had formed it.

We’d had an earlier batch of Swallowtail this summer, but what with my deepening laziness, and its consequence of avoiding the LABORS of blogging, no note of those creature came to be written. Two of their names were Castor and Pollux; the third one, perhaps disliking “foreign” names, managed to crawl out of the box and disappeared before it was time to curl up for transformation.

Mind you, we now have a quite respectable stand of milkweed plants. But no Monarchs deigned to leave offspring at our new Butterfly Ranch. Good thing too. Distinguishing between male and female Monarch is much, much more difficult. Someday, perhaps, I’ll have a chance to address the subject…