So sometime in the future, I'll share my pictures of the tree's life in the winter, but let's start with butterflies.
Right in the middle of this picture is an itty bitty spider. What you thought only butterflies lived in a butterfly garden?
Here it is, the raised bed butterfly garden in the NW corner of my yard. Built it my own self.
We will start with the egg.
I know there is a great philosophical question about which came first the butterfly or the egg, but for the sake of this blog we will start with the egg. This is the egg of a black swallowtail.
Eggs hatch into caterpillars. This one is a Monarch Caterpillar.
This one is of an unknown (as of yet) Butterfly caterpillar.
A Monarch caterpillar on a milkweed plant.
Black Swallowtail caterpillars.
Swallowtail.
Sometimes the caterpillar do not grow up. They fall prey to these guys, a caterpillar wasp.
They end up paralysed in the wasp's burrow as food for its eggs when they hatch into larva.
But some of them make into the pupae stage and in time become one of these:
Which in time become one of these:
A full fledged black swallowtail butterfly.
Can a butterfly be fledged?
Would it be a fully scaled butterfly. But that sounds too much like it is .....well lizard like or something. Let's just say it is a finish version.
I like butterflies. The monarches and viceroys have gotten to be fewer and fewer over the past few years. I do hope they return someday soon to my garden.
More pictures will come of more butterflies as time goes on.
7 comments:
Really beautiful. We had a few caterpillars feeding on our tomato plant leaves when we lived in VA, until one day I saw one of the caterpillars hadn't moved from where it been the day before. I watched it over the ensuing days and weeks. One day, I saw the skin bulge from the inside. Ugh!
Then, one day, I happened to notice something . . . emerging . . . from the side of our caterpillar - it was a smallish wasp. It was then I consulted my little insect guide, and realized that my caterpillar had been a pot luck for the wasp larvae. Poor little guy.
Good story. One animal's pest is another's food and yet another's spiritual metaphor.
When I was a kid, I was sent out to my grandmother's garden to pick the worms off of the dill plants. I didn't know those "worms" were the catapillars of the black swallowtail butterfly.
Today I plant the dill plants in order to attract and provide nurse plants for the black swallowtails and their catapillars.
Now is the time for you to find a way to make moneyh off of your early dream of being a photographer. Just do it.
Money? Make Money?
I didn't go professional because I loved my photography too much to prostitute it. After spending a day in orientation at Brooks Institute, I decide that if I became a professional I would be a slave to someone else's needs and direction. I would have to do what they wanted me to do with my pictures. I decided I would rather never take another picture than do that.
Yep, I have been a fricken idealist all of my life.
So I decided to be a geographer instead, cause I knew nobody in their right mind would actually pay me to do that.
So these photographs are for my own pleasure, and I am sharing them with anyone who cares to enjoy them. Bona petite as they say.
Beautiful!!
I didn't really like the catepillar killer. Can we get rid of them!? No, I bet they have some purpose in the big big world we live in.
I was impressed by your construction maade by your own hands. That's pretty darn good
I understand. So don't be a prostitute. Just be a slut -- but let the guys who will buy you drinks and dinner and pay your cab home! Do what you want to do, and if you can make some money, great. If not ...
Es todo. :-)
Yep, I did the Slut thing to get what I wanted out of my last job.
Well I'm just gun-shy about putting my real soul on the line so to speak. I know you know what I'm talking about. We do what we have to do when we have to do it. But some things we just hold close and don't put out in the market place to be dinigrated or rejected. It is neither an act of cowardice or a rejection of greed.
But thanks for the suggestion.
By the way, who would want to buy them anyway?
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