The Constancy of Butterflies

I am going on my 11^th month in Texas, well technically I did skip a month when I went to ME this summer, but for the months I have been here I can say one constant thing has been the company of butterflies.   I was shocked to find them skittering over the ground when I arrived in January.

 Dainty Sulphurs, all along a rocky path that seemed to have little in the way of food items, but there they were.  They are said to feed on dogweeds and sneezeweeds and, in that I have no idea what those plants look like, they may very well be along my daily path around the neighborhood.  They are in the Aster family so maybe some teeny tiny starry flower is right by my feet and I don’t see it.  These tiny butterflies seem to be here year round with an ebb and flow that perhaps represents a time when they are in their pupa phase.  I read somewhere that they zip through metamorphosis, which seems believable in that they are only about 1” wide.  How long can it take to grow to that size?

Spring featured Acacia trees full of Red Admiral butterflies, ones that would congregate in great numbers on plates of overripe bananas.  I felt I had landed in a tropical rain forest with them flitting everywhere.   The omnipresent Pipevine Swallowtail followed them in the summer, and again as often as I had looked up the pipevine plant I still couldn’t find it in my lawn.

 Try to tell that to the females that were forever bending their abdomen over some random leaf in the grass apparently laying eggs.  The spiky red caterpillars followed and adult swallowtails were a daily sight through summer and into fall so I guess they knew what they were doing.   

In late summer, an explosion of Blue Mist flowers around the gazebo drew in throngs of Queen butterflies, a bright orange butterfly with a black border.  Smaller and in a different family that the milkweed-loving Monarch, they still seem to lead a lot of people into thinking they are seeing Monarchs.  In my yard there were far more Queens than Monarchs but when the Monarchs did show up they seemed to love these flowers too.  So from early morning to dusk butterflies in a blue mist stupor could entertain you.  Drinking, then taking a lap or two, then coming back to dive in again. There must have been 20 at a time at the height of it and some are still floating about, now trying to eek a living out of the few flowers that remain.

Then came an “almost killing frost”.   The day after, as I was doing a hike with some 5^th graders we kept coming across the still forms of swallowtails that hadn‘t been swallowed, yummy abdomen still intact so, no “crime scene” here, just the sad luck of not finding cover on a chilly night.  So I thought 11 months would be the amount of time butterflies would be present in my little stretch of Texas.

When this morning, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but brand new Red Admirals fresh from the pupa to here!  So the flitting game continues, the bananas are out again and an afternoon walk showed all the hardies that had survived this first round of cold.  Fritillaries, Clouded Sulphurs even the really large one called, inventively, the Large Orange Sulphur, which is completely yellow by the way, and a few Monarchs were all spotted on this day when the temps reached 60 again.  Long live the Lepidoptera!  Maybe there never will be a month in Texas without them winging past. 

And that is something I should be thankful for don’t you think?  With Thanksgiving on the horizon then, lets say “Thank you God for the constancy of butterflies in my little corner of the world.”  May there be a constancy of beauty in your world too, in one form or the other.