Month: August 2011

Dan really outdid himself with the gift he brought me this afternoon. He walked into my study holding a large black-and-yellow butterfly and asked, “Is this a Giant Swallowtail?”

It was indeed. He’d caught it while it fluttered lazily at the phlox in our garden. What makes this noteworthy is this:

We’re at the tip of the red arrow, roughly.

The one and only time I’ve ever seen this species was a number of years ago, perhaps 2005. It was visiting my mom’s garden at my parents’ old house in the Greater Toronto Area. The species is very rare in Ontario; it occurs regularly in small numbers in southwestern Ontario, but the farther east you go the rarer it seems to become. Of course, it doesn’t breed out this way, so all occurrences of the butterfly here are immigrants that either traveled here under their own steam or were blown here in a weather system. The Canadian Biodiversity Information Facility has a species page for Giant Swallowtail, on which they note, “In 1992, a stray was recorded in the Ottawa area for the first time following high winds resulting from a hurricane in the southern U.S.” Could today’s visitor have ridden up ahead of Irene?

These are beautiful big butterflies. They fly as if their oversized wings are too big to flap properly, like floppy clowns’ shoes. They float lazily in the air, never traveling very high, cruising from one spot to another with what appears to be hardly any effort at all. Dan said when he first saw it above the garden he initially thought it was a falling leaf.

They also have the distinct habit of fluttering while they visit flowers. I took a couple of photos of it in Dan’s hand then had him release it. It stuck around the garden and I followed it about, camera in hand, trying to get a good photo as it resumed feeding on the phlox, but it wouldn’t stop fluttering. In fact, it seemed to use its wings to push its head deep into the throat of the flower. Judging by the blurred wings I see in many of the photos on Google Image search, this wasn’t unique to our butterfly.

Down south, in its breeding range, this species is considered a pest of citrus orchards, especially oranges which has earned its caterpillars the name of “Orange Dogs”. It’ll also feed on Hop Tree (Ptelea trifoliata) and Prickly-ash (Zanthoxylum americanum) where citrus trees aren’t common, such as up here (though both species actually in the same family as oranges and other citrus). I don’t think we’ve got Hop Trees here, but we certainly have lots of Prickly-ash about. I wonder if their range might expand, or if it’s not the availability of food plants that limits its northern distribution, but rather something like average winter temperatures or snowfall affecting overwintering survival.

My camera’s battery died after I’d run off a dozen shots, and since it seemed to be hanging about the garden and not going anywhere I hurried in to grab my spare. But when I returned, it’d disappeared, presumably off into the meadow somewhere. Safe travels, buddy, and thanks for visiting!

Dan’s been showering me with gifts lately. The baby snake a couple of days ago, and then yesterday he caught me a swallowtail butterfly. I had him hold it for a couple of photos and then asked him to put it on our hydrangeas on the off-chance it might not fly away right away. It didn’t, and I was able to get some nice shots of it.

We have two black swallowtails that occur here: Black Swallowtails (Papilio polyxenes) and black-morph female Canadian Tiger Swallowtails (P. canadensis). From the top, the easiest way to tell the two apart is the orange spot at the corner of the hindwing – in Blacks it’s got a black dot in it, while in Tigers it’s just solid orange. Also, Blacks will show that faded yellow band partly up the wing, while Tigers don’t. The extensive blue in the hindwing makes this a female Black Swallowtail – males will have a bolder mid-wing yellow stripe and much reduced blue.

Black Canadian Tigers are apparently rare, but at least up here in eastern Ontario Black Swallowtails are near the edge of their range and so not a whole lot more common. I would see Black Swallowtails from time to time back in the Toronto area, but I’m not sure if I’ve seen one since moving east. My mom had one at their place farther east from us this summer, though.

Black Swallowtail caterpillars feed on plants in the parsley family, Apiaceae. This includes, of course, parsley, but also a number of other cultivated and native species such as carrot, dill, fennel, parsnip, Queen Anne’s Lace and other plants that bear similar umbrella-shaped inflorescences. I haven’t seen caterpillars on any of my parsley plants, or on the wild parsnip or Queen Anne’s Lace in our area… but I haven’t looked too closely, either. The species overwinters in the pupa stage, which means they’ll be caterpillars through the fall, so I should keep an eye on our plants and see if anything turns up.