Odysseus the Little

Lovely sunny day. It follows a series of very rainy days and such adventures as a partially flooded basement, a battle with the sump pump, walking Katie the Beagle, and then toweling her down.

Today is different. The sump pump hums. The basement is dry. Katie went walking in sunlight. Incidentally, when women with children see me walking Katie, they say, “Look, look, honey. See? A puppy!” But this puppy is a great-grand-mother, almost blind, and suffering from a chronic lung condition. Alas. Katie went walking with Monique this morning and, again, looked like a puppy.

Inside the house I glanced at the aquarium where we are raising two Black Swallowtail caterpillars. Startled by something, I stopped dead. Can’t be! But it was. One of the pupae, by far the smaller of the two, had opened and released a Butterfly. Just last night I was sure that pupae was done for. Join me in saying Welcome—to Odysseus the Little shown here in two versions: in the shade and in the sun. The yellow coloration says male. Brigitte is into Greek names for butterflies, hence Odysseus. She shortens that to Ody. This little fellow had had a fight to be born.

Soon now Ody will take off. We’re guessing that it will be in a north-westerly direction. Always so—whether back east in Grosse Point or here in Wolverine. And Monarchs have the same sense of direction. They know something we do not.

Milkweeds and Monarchs

We moved to our current location (west side of Metro Detroit) from our decades-long residence on the east side around in late summer of 2014. That also turned out to be a move from a tiny but very active backyard, garden, and Swallowtail butterfly ranch to a huge yard with much grass, a pear tree, and a grand rectangle all around it of bushes and trees grand trees.

Back in the old country, to call it something memorable, anxious then to diversify our Swallowtail population by adding Monarchs, we planted a milkweed bush bought at a garden store. Pictures of that plant back in 2013 are shown here.

After settling here, we discovered milkweed growing wildly off an almost daily-taken road called Ladd. We dug up a couple and planted them in our new huge yard. They multiplied. We now have what amounts to a milkweed forest. It looks like this:

Indeed there are more plants than shown here; the largest are to the right. As these plants took hold, our new terrain became a kind of Mecca for Monarchs. Every day this summer at least one Monarch took a leisurely but intense inspection of our forest. We even raised a few—but nothing like the number of Swallowtails we used to raise; by the end of our stay, that activity had become something of a job. The reason for this difference is that Monarchs are more difficult to find (in their bug form) and to keep alive indoors as caterpillars; partly our fault: we’ve grown more forgetful and careless. Thanks to chance (is there such a thing?), we settled next door to Pat (for Patricia), who turns out herself to be a Grand Mistress of Monarch Raising. With her help we’ve managed to raise about three or four—and to release them to the Wild (read our backyard). To our delight, we’ve seen that both Swallowtails and Monarch all take off in the same direction when released, flying generally to the northwest, much as they did back in the “old country” we left behind.

What’s a blog without a mention of our closest friends and the plants they eat. Here, to be complete, I must mention that with zero effort, lots of Cotton Whites also inhabit our paradise. They live in the grass, we think; it is never too closely cut by the myself, the Mower of the Grass.

Dawn of the Monarchs

Some preliminary notes on context. In the summer of 2014 we moved from the east to the west of the Detroit metro area. In the east we lived in Grosse Pointe; now we live in a village called Wolverine Lake.

In Grosse Point Brigitte chanced upon a butterfly egg on a dill plant. The dill was growing in the crack of the concrete near our garage. Brigitte coaxed that egg into our first butterfly—raised indoors and then released. It was a Black Swallowtail. Thereafter we raised several generations of Swallowtails; they came to lay eggs on plentiful patches of dill we were always raising deliberately or by chance. Eventually we got to wondering why Monarchs never left traces enough for us to add them to the output of our Butterfly Ranch, as we came to call our tiny backyard. This led us to plant some milkweed there; Monarchs like to start new life on large milkweed leaves. That planting was around 2013, possibly earlier, but no Monarch ever came or, as we now believe, we never noticed.  Monarch lay very, very tiny eggs, faintly yellow in color, easily mistaken as mere spots on the leaves. From these spots come tiny caterpillars that, initially, require a powerful magnifier even to see. So 2013 passed. We packed and moved to Wolverine Lake.

Here, for some reason, Swallowtails haven’t yet found our forests of dill. We have much more yard here; thus we also planted several milkweed plants. On these, thanks to the much more educated eyes of our neighbor, Pat Littlefield, Monarchs left their eggs. With Pat’s help, we have finally succeeded in nurturing three of those invisible yellow spots into as many gorgeous Monarchs. We’re showing our third, a young lady, called Scarlet. When the first two, Romeo and Juliet, were ready to take wing, we had not yet mastered the art of releasing butterflies while also managing a camera.

So now the Era of the Monarchs has begun here, in the west. More to come. As for ancient history, see the index and click on Butterflies. You'll see information on Monarchs as well, but not one that we had raised ourselves and released after its emergence from its translucent pupae.

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…

Butterflies and the Bush-on-a-Tree

Sunday last we saw our favorite butterfly for the first time, the Black Swallowtail, feeding in all leisure off the blooms of a rather curious tree of ours. It is a Dwarf Lilac known to the botanists as Syringa meyeri ‘Palibin’. I call it a curious tree because it is actually a combined form of a tree below and a bush above accomplished by grafting. The Korean Dwarf Lilac ordinarily has a very short stem of no more than 5 inches, so that the lilac hugs the ground. But look at these pictures:

The trunk of this “tree” measures 3.5 feet from the ground to the point where the branches articulate—thus way taller than the Korean Dwarf Lilac’s natural height. Our tree, therefore, is what they call a topgraft. The top part is a Dwarf Lilac and is called the scion; the trunk must be from a genetically related plant that grows quite high; it is called the interstem. With dwarf lilacs the two interstems normally used are Syringa villosa or the Japanese Lilac (Syringa reticulata). Our interstem is definitely a Villosa, commonly known as Lilac, Late; note, on the picture above, the green branches growing at the stem’s bottom; those leaves are the original leaves of the stem and helped me identify it. The Dwarf Lilac’s leaves are much smaller, darker in color, and of a different shape. But let me emphasize, again, that both the trunk and the top belong to the same genus; genetic similarity is a must for successful topgrafting.

The bloom of our little lily is shown on the left. It has a very faint odor now, but that odor will grow more and more pronounced as we enter the month of June.

Our Black Swallowtails arrived in pairs, one significantly larger than the other. They are very dark butterflies with a distinct yellow marking on the wings. They stood out splendidly against the lilac blossoms so that we could clearly make them out even from a distance; they were our own. Among other butterflies we’ve seen thus far are a Monarch (still alive, looks like), a Yellow Tiger Swallowtail, and a handful of Cabbage Whites. We feel quite comfortable with the butterflies. As for the Syringa meyeri, it will take some time before we get used to its curious duality.

Locating Identity

One of my personal Eureka moments came many years ago when I discovered the mitochondria, the tiny structures that produce the energy used within our cells. Mitochondria have DNA of their own—separate from the DNA in each cell’s nucleus. In humans, and most other species that have mitochondria, these structures are passed on to offspring exclusively from the mother. Hence, tracking mitochondrial DNA, we can search ever backward in time tracing the maternal line. We haven’t found Eve yet, but it may be possible. Adam is quite untraceable.

This came to mind yesterday when I read about claims (still not fully accepted) that the caterpillar and the butterfly that it becomes may be of two different species that once joined forces for a kind of biological tour de force. My mitochondrial encounter years ago suggested to me that bodies are chemical civilizations—imperfectly uniting quite diverse strands of living things—and indeed coexisting only because they are a kind of community of separates rather than a seamless whole. Humans can only digest, for instance—and therefore live—because we host a diverse community of bacteria.

Our bodies, of course, do not remain the same even from day to day. Yesterday we retrieved all or most of our photo albums. Some of them have photos that go back to the nineteenth century. Pictures of ourselves show the enormous changes that have taken place in our own bodies—which in turn, all these impressions, shaken well in a blender, made me wonder what identity means—and how it might be located.

Amusingly that word, identity, derives from the Latin phrase idem et idem, best translated into our own “same-old, same-old.” Thus identity is sameness. But in the physical world nothing is ever, strictly speaking, the same—not even that hard, attractive spoon I use to stir the coffee which, by chance, we “abstracted” from a house we rented in Florida three years ago. Even that spoon has lost some mass in the meantime.

If we cling strictly to a materialistic explanation of identity, it turns out that the best explanation for identity is statistical. I am statistically much the same today as yesterday, and never mind the 50 to 70 billion cells that died since 10:23 yesterday, which—thanks to Summer Time’s arrival (even time changes)—is 11:23 today.

Approximation must suffice to locate identity in time and space; to locate it absolutely we must leave the reservation and, having reread Plato’s Phaedo, we must start to feel familiar with the concept that the human self is immaterial and indestructible; its relationship to DNA, cellular or mitochondrial, is rather loose and tentative. Which suggests the happy thought that when our next caterpillar breaks is chrysalis and emerges as a butterfly, a single gorgeous soul will flutter away even if generated by two species in cooperation.

The Caterpillar-Butterfly Problem

We spent part of the afternoon reading about the mind-body problem (in Times Literary Supplement, “Consciousness myth,” Galen Strawsom, link). This afternoon I came across another rather interesting problem—a kind of radical dualism between the caterpillar and the butterfly. A quite excellent outline of this issues is presented on the blog Gypsy Scholar here. What with our own extensive relations to both, caterpillars and butterflies, at least a reference to this matter is appropriate here—especially with snow inches deep on the dormant grass.

Our Butterfly Gallery

This time of year, in recent years, we like to remember the brighter season when butterflies are visiting. With that I thought I’d end November on that same note. To be sure, with the move now well behind us, we have also left behind our Butterfly Ranch (Rancho Mariposa). But we are at least mentally preparing to see our friends at this new location too—and to make it welcoming to Order Lepidoptera.

Meanwhile, of course, butterflies are still in motion—constant motion, you might say—on the ceiling of our sunniest upstairs room. As a mobile. Air heated by our floor-hugging radiators keeps them turning, turning near the ceiling, and what with the fascinating design of this genre of sculpture, kinetic sculpture as it is called, our paper creatures exhibit a quite life-like behavior. They move so much that it was quite a labor to find one photograph of a dozen that showed them all fully.

We got to wondering about mobiles. We’re very fond of them. Another, with swallows, hangs downstairs. Who made the first of these? I was dubious of discovering a single inventor, but Brigitte had a name in mind if only it would come up with it. With that encouragement, I went on a search and discovered Alexander Calder (1898-1976), an American sculptor, and the originator of this genre. The first mobiles of the sort shown here, thus moved by currents of air, date to 1931. They were named “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp, a fellow artist, in 1932; thereafter Calder classed his immobile sculptures “stabiles.” Mobiles took the world by storm after a 1946 showing in the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris.

We live in a world of mobility—and mobile device. Ours, sure enough, go back to about the time of our birth. The kind you carry around with you, to make you mobile, are a bit too complicated for such as us entirely to master.

Butterfly Mecoin

In what struck Brigitte as a meaningful coincidence, the New York Times today, on its front page, brought a story about the Monarch butterfly and Milkweed—to close out a year in which, in the context of butterflies, was a central event in our live this year. Meaningful coincidences, we gratefully note, are frequent enough so that Brigitte has coined a new word to refer to them: mecoin; it’s easier to write in diaries and such than the full phrase with 23 letters.

Yes, we saw our own milkweed—planted in what seemed an almost meaningless gesture to help save the Monarch from ultimate doom—bloom for the first time this summer. Today we discovered that we are not alone. Major public efforts, headed by such institutions as the University of Northern Iowa (once a neighboring state), the University of Minnesota and the University of Kansas (we’ve lived in both of those states), along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Academy of Sciences are collaborating in the establishment of large tracts of land on which the milkweed, and other ecology-friendly weeds, will grow profusely and provide the thinning populations of the Monarch a little genuine hope. To this list I should also add the State of Mexico; it is also striving to reverse this most deplorable population crash.

It’s warmish out; the snow still lies fairly thick on the ground. As it rains steadily. The year is almost over. I thought I’d written all I would, this year, on butterflies back in November. But now a mecoin gives me one last chance to promote this worthy effort.

And, by the way, we are also providing milkweed seed we’ve harvested to members of the far-flung family so that our batch will multiply and once more fill the earth.

Monarch Decline

A feature in the New York Times this morning brings news of the belated arrival of the migrating Monarch butterfly in Mexico. The Monarchs always arrive on November 1, a day celebrated in Mexico as the Day of the Dead. This year they were a week late. Both that Day of the Dead (link) and the dramatic decline in Monarch population (link) have been noted on this blog before. The Times story says that last year 60 million monarchs arrived in Mexico—a greatly diminished display of what the Mexicans think of as the souls of the dead. This year just a shade fewer than 3 million reached Mexico. The cause for this decline is summarized in my second link: it is the use of herbicides which devastates the milkweed.

As behooves people with our convictions, we have a very long view of the future and therefore expect that “this too shall pass.” There are balances in Nature that Long Time corrects even when the Near Term visits its mindless destruction on the environment. But I won’t be around when our version of the milkweed suddenly disappears and human numbers begin to collapse dramatically. At the end, I hope, the few millions left of us will still see a few million Monarchs once more migrating across the continents for landfall on the Day of the Dead. 

Nymphalis Antiopa

In what had been a very, very active butterfly spring and summer—we raised 13 Black Swallowtails and have been entertaining a small tribe of Cabbage Whites—late summer, now moving toward autumn in lengthening strides, has left our little eden here bereft of new species. Until yesterday. A very large and virtually black butterfly landed on one of our tomato plants, staying in the shade of its leaves. We watched it for quite a time, just resting. Then I got my camera and tried to make a stealth-approach, but the creature sensed my coming and betook itself, next, to the roof of our sunroom to find a new perch in a coil of cable wiring at is edge. We managed to get a look at it, finally, from a stairway window—from a distance of about three feet. But then, maneuvering my camera to take a shot, I triggered its flight response. No. I never managed to take a picture.

Fortunately I had had a close look. And today, therefore, I was able to identify it as a Mourning Cloak, Nymphalis antiopa. The picture I am showing here is taken from Wikipedia’s article on this species, and I chose the image that most closely resembles our own. Mourning Cloak is a particularly large butterfly—and the females are markedly larger than the males. For this reason we’re pretty sure that we’d encountered a lady, furthermore rather an old one. Always a pleasure to say Hello to yet another rarely seen species—but, I am told, quite common in North America.

The name is interesting. The Brits call this butterfly Camberwell Beauty, but in Germanic languages the literal meaning of Mourning Cloak is used: in German, Trauermantel; in Swedish, Sorgmantel. The antiope of the Latin name harks back to Antiopa, a Greek figure with a dramatic history. Tragedy surrounded her, so much so that Pacuvius, a renowned Roman tragedian (he died in 130 BC), wrote a tragedy about her. Mourning becomes Nymphalis…

Added Later: Herewith some additional interesting facts about the Mourning Cloak. It belongs to the Superfamily Papilionoidea, the Family Nymphalidae, also called four-footed. In the American context it is the longest-lived species of butterfly with a life of 10-11 months. It is a tree-dwelling butterfly (willows, elms, cottonwood, birch), likes to feed on tree sap and rotting fruit, and its coloration makes it look like tree-bark. It’s also rather big, with a wingspan of 2.25 to 4-inch wing span. They extend form lower Canada to northern Mexico, do a lot of travelling in the Summer months, rest in the fall, overwinter, and then breed in the Spring.

Fruits of the Season

The tomatoes come from our garden, the earliest. The peaches come from Monique's tree--way over on the other side of the metro area. We also saw, yesterday, the arrival of two Black Swallowtail males, named Max and Moritz. They were the eleventh and twelfth of our "production" this year--and the thirteenth, not yet named, will probably break from its chrysalis tomorrow. Moritz is resting on the leaf of our hydrangea brush. He dried his wings on that leaf for better than an hour, having flown there from our outdoor metal table. Then, finally, deep sigh, out into the world...

The Attack on Monarchy

Herewith a picture of healthy milkweed beginning to flower in our own backyard. It was planted late last year from a pot and has done very well indeed. This and similar varieties of milkweed represent the principal food source of Monarch butterflies—and grow copiously in soybean and corn plantations—hence represent a nuisance in agriculture. Our solution is chemical. Over the decades a major war of extermination—a kind of final solution—has been devised to get rid of the milkweed. The herbicide used is called glyphosate used in combination with genetically-modified and therefore glyphosate-tolerant corn and soybean. Modernity at work.

The consequence of this has been a major shrinkage of the Monarch population. One estimate suggests a 93 percent drop in the 1997-2013 period. That is more than significant. It’s been coming on slowly, but now we’re reaching what might be an end-stage. A scientific study (link), published in Insect Conservation and Diversity, shows recent results for the U.S. Midwest. In the 1999 to 2010 period, milkweed declined by 58, the Monarch population by 81 percent.

The Monarch over-winters in central Mexico in an area about 62 miles north-west of Mexico City; the nearest town is Michoacán, Mexico. There, in 1986, the Mexican government established the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. It is about 138 acres in size (a tad over a fifth of a square mile), but, these days, fewer than 3 acres of that reserve are actually used by the Monarch—down from 7.14 acres last year. The same pattern there as here. Blaming the Mexican government for tolerating logging in that area has been used to explain the decline for years; but logging has stopped; and now the real reason has been tracked back to the ingenuity of Monsanto; its glyphosate is known as Roundup. Well, they’re rounding up the Monarch too.

Our own milkweed will multiply, we think. Okay, it’s just a gesture. Thus far we’ve seen no monarch in our glen, but hope springs eternal. And some gestures, eventually, become the new reality.

Dido and Aeneas

Of some thirteen eggs deposited on our dill plants early this butterfly season, six survived to form their pupae. Of these four had taken flight as of yesterday morning. Brigitte named the two still in chrysalis Dido and Aeneas. We took Aeneas across the Metro to Monique and John’s domain, thus paralleling Aeneas own travel from Troy to North Africa. Dido emerged yesterday morning—and luckily for us was indeed a female. I bring her image here. She was quite large and flew off in the already well-established and, one might say, blessed northerly direction.

Butterflies, fortunately, have not as yet reached the exalted stages of existence where the conquest of great cities, murder, suicide, tragedy, and high poetic drama play any role at all. Dido therefore is safe. Indeed she was a splendid specimen, quite large, and fluttered off with great energy. Brigitte’s naming strategy, by contrast—drawn from Greek and Roman culture—and their latterday operatic re-celebrations—caused me to have to look up who Dido actually was, and this despite having dipped a little into Virgil’s Aenead. A dip is all it has turned out to be and may remain so. I’m coming around to the view that butterflies may be on a culturally much more exalted level then the Greeks and Romans were. As for Aeneas, he is still in his chrysalis and will be the last to go.

Palatial Birthing Chamber

The mysterious-looking image we present here is the covered cradle for five Black Swallowtail butterflies. Four of them are survivors of twelve!! eggs deposited by an early visitor to our butterfly ranch late in May. It laid its eggs on a quite small dill plant which, itself, had grown in the crack of our driveway but had been replanted in a pot. These four have now settled down and are about to develop their chrysalides. A Swallowtail Mom deposited the fifth one on another dill plant, of our own planting, later; it has a ways to go yet.

Each new year adds to our understanding—and lengthens the season. We’ve already dispatched two butterflies in May. They had spent all winter hibernating in our garage. We now know that the active season extends from early May to late September—when the last-laid eggs mature into caterpillars that form their chrysalides to sail through the winter frosts. We’ve already experienced raising multiple swallowtails simultaneously, but raising four from the same batch is something new. Meanwhile—and we noted this already last season—the Monarch is going through some difficult times. They are said to suffer from climate change and excessive use of pesticides. We saw very few of them last summer and, to date, only a single one so far. No chemicals are used here, at Rancho Mariposa, to be sure. And we even planted milkweed last year to send Monarchs a signal. No takers. Our advertising campaign needs a little work.

Seasonal Notes

Unusual early warmth last year, an unusual cold spell in 2013, has caused us to spend at least a month marveling at Nature’s variability.  Last year everything began to bloom late in March already; this year the same process began late in April. Spring 2013, however, also brings multiple new phenomena to our late-blooming backyard garden. One of them, already touched upon in the last posting, is that two Black Swallowtail butterflies spent a full seven months and two weeks as chrysalides and then, early this month, both emerged. We were, of course, unsure what gender they were, individually or severally. Brigitte had named them Castor and Pollux. When Castor emerged we took her to be a lady, but learning (certainly at our age), is sometimes missy. It turns out that Black Swallowtails with yellow markings are male; those with white markings female. We had to look up this distinction again. Castor and Pollux, it turned out had been rightly named. Both were males; Pollux arrived on May 5. I show him resting on the same forsythia bush as his earlier and much more energetic brother. Pollux spent hours on that bush before himself taking off—and flying in a contrary direction, the first of many ever to do so; he flew South.

Our quince bush produced voluminous red flowers this spring. They appear at the bottom of the bush rather than at the tip of the branches. We are still investigating what manner of adaptation that represents. And our lilac bush, which is now observing its third spring, finally shows very energetic signs of actually producing flowers—and in volume. Those I will show some other time.

Diapause

Down Mexico-way Monarch butterflies that left their chrysalides last September of thereabouts are beginning to emerge, this month, from a curious state of suspension known as the diapause. The word, from the Greek for “stopping,” means that their normal development stopped as the weather turned cool; they stopped consuming food; their sexual development ended; nonetheless they managed to make the huge trek from our northern climes here all the way down to Mexico. Down there they settled in on trees, in masses, to rest from their voyage and to await Springtime.

It is hard to credit that the grey masses in the center are monarchs—especially when glimpsing some obvious monarchs on the left. A close-up makes what we see here more credible:

Monarchs have an average lifespan, as butterflies, lasting between 2-6 weeks. They produce four generations every year of that length. But in the last, the fifth, generation of every season, they have an “active hibernation,” thus a special kind of diapause. They fly great distances before they hang on trees. This, you might call it the Greatest Generation, persists in the butterfly form for 6-8 months. Pondering this I note the fact that the lovely butterfly stage of these insects exists strictly for reproduction. When some external factor—like a prolonged change in temperature—threatens the completion of that mission, they have work-arounds. The diapause is an example, active hibernation a more extreme form of it.

Some species of butterfly—the Red Admiral and the Painted Lady, to name two already mentioned on this blog—overwinter as adult butterflies. Most others do so as pupae. Our own Black Swallowtails are an example. Two of them (Castor and Pollux, as Brigitte named them), formed chrysalides last September 14, 16 (link). They are still with us—waiting—in a big jar out in the garage. I checked on them this morning to see if the warm spells we’d had a ways back had disturbed their suspension in time. All seemed well. The temperature outside right now is 18° F. I expect it will be late March, early May before they cast off their shells and turn to Organic Life’s Job 1: reproduction.

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The first image is from Wikipedia; the trees are called Oyamel. The location is the outskirts of Anagangueo, Michoacán, Mexico. The second image comes from Arizona University (link).

The Butterfly as Muse

The season is in dormancy. Two pupae from last season wait in a glass outdoors—to help them feel the cold, under whose influence their tiny hidden bodies will generate a kind of antifreeze; they dream of Spring. But, despite that, the Spirit of the Butterfly is present still. I found a note from Brigitte this morning with a poem by Brandon Watson inspired by the Butterfly as Muse. We’re grateful. Brigitte’s note said: “How utterly wonderful! Thank you, Brandon!” I join her. Pure delight (link).

Hylephila Phyleus

Fall set in early, but when I wondered here whether or not the butterfly season was over, I was wrong. We are now raising Number 10 and 11 of our year’s flock of Black Swallowtail butterflies. And others are still very active in our yard.

Today I want to introduce a member of yet another Superfamily of the Lepidoptera, the Fiery Skipper. It belongs to the superfamily Hesperiodidea (a great word for practicing skill in keying). It consists of eight families, of which our little yellow creature is a member of one. Of the three superfamilies, we have now seen representatives of two. For an overview, herewith a tabulation:

The Butterfly Big Picture
Superfamily/Family	Names	In Our Yard
Hedyloidea	Moths	Maybe
Hesperiodidea	Skippers	Yes
Hesperiinae	Grass Skippers	Fiery Skipper
7 other families		No
Papilionoidea	Butterflies	Yes
Lycaenidae	Brush-footed	No
Nymphalidae	Four-footed	Common Buckeye,       Mourning Cloak
		Monarch
		Painted Lady
		Red Admiral
Papilionidae	Swallowtails	Black Swallowtail
Pieridae	Whites	Small Cabbage
Riodinidae	Metalmarks	No

The fiery skipper is a quite small and a very quick-moving insect, especially as it hops around from bloom to bloom on our mint plants. It reveals itself as a butterfly only when it flies some distances, and then it looks like a miniature butterfly. The first picture I show, as close to a close-up as I’ve yet managed, reveals a creature I first took to be a bee with very big and colored wings. The Fiery Skipper actually has two sets of wings, nicely visible here.

There seem to be the same class distinctions between insects as there are in our society: the hoity-toity upper layers and then the massive humbler classes. The Fiery Skipper belongs to the latter group. In their world decorum, especially in public, is less cultivated—so that Brigitte observed a public mating no sooner than I’d learned to spell Skipper. She called me in excitement from the basement—and I rushed to take the second picture. In my haste, the focus is bad, but our testimony is true. You can also see how the Fiery Skipper looks from the side, its wings folded up. The wings are held like that for all serious activity—thus for eating and for mating.

Oklahoma: Smart People

It surprised me to learn today that only 29 of the 50 states in our United States have officially designated butterflies, indeed only 43 of 50 have officially designated insects—and Michigan is not on either list (ht Brigitte). Well, turns out, that Michigan is trying. An Oakland County web site tells us that the state insect is the Green Darner Dragon Fly, but that’s only unofficially. Now in our opinion any legislature so focused on tax cutting and levying fees that it has no time to designate a State Insect by majority vote needs drumming out of office. Around this household we know what is important!

We salute the smart people of Oklahoma for selecting the Black Swallowtail Butterfly, the star of Rancho Mariposa, as its state butterfly—and the European Honey Bee as its state insect. Not all participating states do—but some have both. Oklahoma has gone the whole nine yards.

Got to wondering about places where places where we have lived. Missouri, Kansas, Virginia, Minnesota, and now Michigan. Missouri and Kansas both have state insects, the European Honey Bee. Virginia, another smart state, has a Swallowtail too, but it is the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. Minnesota opts for the Monarch. The Monarch, incidentally, rules! It is the state butterfly of Alabama, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Texas, Vermont, and West Virginia. The hands-down winner among the insects? The European Honey Bee: Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming: The United States of Honey Bee!

Can’t this man get off this fluttering subject already? Impossible, dear friends. We have lots of butterflies now. Two Monarchs came to the Rancho just yesterday to partake of the nectar of our Japanese Knotweed, a kind of bamboo—not counting dozens of Fiery Skippers and our regulars, the Small White Cabbage. The knotweed is now in full bloom, and its high branches and white blooms were aswarm with the winners of this morning’s state competition: Monarchs and Bees.

And then, last night, my eyes just casually brushing some small fennel plants, I detected our tenth caterpillar of the year astride one of its slender green stems. It looks like another Swallowtail hoping to be born here so that it can flutter off to where it really belongs—Oklahoma. Unless our efforts here result in the designation of the Black Swallowtail as the official Michigan State Butterfly. Dream on. Dream on.

The images in sequence: the European Honey Bee, state insect of seventeen states; the Monarch Butterfly, state butterfly of eight states; Oklahoma's Black Swallowtail; Virginia's Tiger Swallowtail; and Michigan's "unofficial" state insect, the Green Darner Dragon Fly. Here some links: State insect web site, State butterfly web site; and Michigan State symbols. The images shown were taken from these.