Black swallowtail caterpillar

When I wandered out onto a piece of the Blackland Prairie on the west side of Heatherwilde Blvd. in Pflugerville on April 30th, I noticed that one of the prairie parsley plants (Polytaenia nuttallii) was host to the caterpillar of an Eastern black swallowtail butterfly (Papilio polyxenes). You can learn more about this species in a Wikipedia article.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Swallowtail butterfly on Texas lantana

Click for greater clarity and size.

Here you have what I think is a black swallowtail butterfly, Papilio polyxenes. The colorful flowers, which make their debut in these pages today, are Texas lantana, Lantana urticoides. In the 1800s this plant was also known as a calico bush, but calico has gone out of fashion and so has that name. Also no longer in vogue is the previous scientific name for this species, Lantana horrida. How someone could ever have thought these lovely flowers horrid is beyond me.

This is the seventh and last in a series of pictures from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on July 23.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

NOTE: Yesterday, at the request of a commenter, I added a closeup of the central part of the saltmarsh mallow in that day’s post.

FM 2323

 

The plan on April 23rd was to drive the 70 or so miles to Llano, then head southwest on FM 2323—and that’s what we did. We’d barely gotten onto that country road when we started seeing scenes like the one above, in which the prominent flowers appear to have been red blanketflowers (Gaillardia amblyodon). In the second picture, the pink flowers with swallowtail butterflies on them were Texas thistles (Cirsium texanum).

  

 

In a nearby part of the property brown bitterweed (Helenium amarum var. badium) predominated.

 

 

 

  

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A main theme in my commentaries since 2020 has been the increasingly blatant double standards we’ve seen: authorities deal with similar situations in very different ways depending on the ideological bent of the people involved. With that in mind, I invite you to read Abigail Shrier’s May 2nd article “There Are Two Sets of Rules for Speech,”

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prairie parsley on the Blackland Prairie

A couple of posts back you saw an Eastern black swallowtail caterpillar that I found on a prairie parsley plant (Polytaenia nuttallii) when I visited the Blackland Prairie west of Heatherwilde Blvd. in Pflugerville on April 30th. After I went back the next day and explored a different part of the parcel, I came across a great stand of prairie parsley flowering away, as shown above. How’s that for density? The mostly red flowers mixed in, by the way, are Gaillardia pulchella, known as firewheels and Indian blankets.

The closer and more downward-looking view below reveals that some of the prairie parsley plants had begun going to seed. The purple flower heads are Texas thistles (Cirsium texanum).

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

The Brother Gardeners

On page 10 of Andrea Wulf’s 2008 book The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire, and the Birth of an Obsession I came across this:

[English gardener Thomas] Fairchild… sold [John] Tradescant’s sycamores as well as Virginian sunflowers, asters, goldenrod and rudbeckia. Aesculus pavia from North America, a small tree which was introduced as “scarlet flower’d horse chestnut” in 1711, blossomed for the first time in Fairchild’s garden….

What struck me is that I’ve shown pictures here of every one of those native North American plants that English gardeners happily imported in the 1600s and 1700s (though not necessarily the same species of each). Prompted by that coincidence, I’ve gone ahead and presented a mostly retrospective collection today. Clicking any but the first photograph won’t show it in isolation the way it usually does but will instead take you back to the original post in case you’d like to read the associated text. Hardly any of you will have seen all those posts, the majority of which appeared in the early years of this blog.

As for the first photograph, I took it on March 2 of this year from a high part of Spicewood Springs Rd. just west of the intersection with Bintliff Dr. Using a telephoto lens, I aimed down into the woods where a creek has fostered the growth of what are now some large sycamore trees, Platanus occidentalis. In addition to the conspicuous white branches, you may be able to make out the hundreds of seed balls hanging from them.

 

A sycamore tree, Platanus occidentalis

 

A colony of sunflowers, Helianthus annuus

 

Heath asters, Aster ericoides.

 

Tall goldenrod, Solidago altissima

 

Brown- or black-eyed susan, Rudbeckia hirta

 

Swallowtail butterfly on flowers of red buckeye, Aesculus pavia.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

Prairie agalinis in front of Texas lantana

After a far and then a somewhat nearer look last time at prairie agalinis, Agalinis heterophylla, here’s an even closer look at a flower of that species. Note its speckled throat and the fringe of tiny hairs on its petals. This time there are no partridge peas in the background but instead a flowering Texas lantana, Lantana urticoides. Today’s view is from September 14th in the Blunn Creek Preserve in south Austin.

Two weeks ago I learned that botanists have moved the genus Agalinis from the figwort family, Scrophulariaceae, into a family with a scientific name I don’t remember having heard of, Orobanchaceae, known as the broomrape family. Live and learn (and if you’re in the world of botany, relearn and relearn and relearn…).

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

An ailing butterfly

On the April 27th field trip to Bastrop State Park led by botanist Bill Carr I came across this ailing pipevine* swallowtail butterfly, Battus philenor, which fluttered about near the ground and didn’t seem able to fly away. That behavior, along with its faded and bedraggled appearance, probably meant that the insect was nearing the end of its life. Notice the swallowtail’s rolled-up proboscis.

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* You saw a pipevine flower in the last post. As Geyata Ajilvsgi notes in Wildflowers of Texas: “Although this plant is common, it is rarely found in flower, for usually larvae of the pipevine swallowtail butterfly… keep it eaten to the ground.”

© 2014 Steven Schwartzman

Red buckeye flowers are attractive

Click for greater clarity.

A recent post showed that what might seem to be buds on a red buckeye, Aesculus pavia var. pavia, open to reveal not flowers but new leaves. If that left you wondering what the tree’s flowers look like, here’s a photograph from March 26 in Great Hills Park to answer that question. Among the flowers are some actual buds, so you get to see what they look like, too.

You’ll probably find these flowers attractive in the figurative sense of the word, but I discovered that they were literally so, in this case attracting a swallowtail butterfly.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

Dainty sulphur

Click for a sharper view of things, including the scales on the wings.

It wasn’t only native plants that I photographed on the morning of February 1, though you do see part of a just-getting-started kidneywood bush, Eysenhardtia texana, in this picture. Of more obvious interest is the butterfly, which was uncommonly docile and didn’t fly away or even move when I got very close with my macro lens. Was it ailing? I don’t know. And I don’t know that much about butterflies in general, but accounts in a couple of field guides make me think this could be a dainty sulphur, Nathalis iole. If there are any lepidopterists out there who can say for sure, please chime in.

The drought of 2011 kept butterfly numbers down, so although I’ve been writing this column for eight months now, today’s post is only the fourth to deal with a butterfly. The other three showed a panorama of a swallowtail on a thistle in a meadow of wildflowers, then a closeup of a two-tailed swallowtail on clammyweed, and finally a monarch on a rain-lily. In the past couple of weeks, which have seen some rain, I’ve noticed that a lot of small sulphur butterflies have suddenly appeared; their presence on February 1 was a welcome chance for another picture of this type.

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UPDATE: Dan Hardy of the Austin Butterfly Forum confirms that this is indeed a dainty sulphur, Nathalis iole.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

Clammyweed revisited—and visited

Two-tailed swallowtail; click for greater detail.

Those of you who have been subscribers to this blog since the last week of June may recall the photographs of clammyweed, Polanisia dodecandra, taken from the side and the top. For whatever reason, I’ve noticed more of this drought-defying species in 2011 than ever before. My latest encounter with it was just yesterday, when I found some growing in the completely dry bed of Barton Creek in south Austin. As I was looking at the plant, a two-tailed swallowtail butterfly, Papilio multicaudata, began fluttering about as it gathered nectar from the clammyweed flowers.* Swallowtails are among the largest of all butterflies that we have in this part of the world, with a wingspan of from 3 to 5 inches, and I’ve usually found them to be quite skittish. This one, though, probably eager to get whatever nourishment it can during the drought, let me get close and take lots of pictures. Occasionally a too-sudden movement of my camera startled it away, but after flying about for a while it always came back.

Note—if you can take your eyes off this attractive butterfly—that the clammyweed is satisfying insects in at least two ways: the destructive way of whatever ate all those little round holes out of the leaves at the left, and of course the non-destructive way of the swallowtail.

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* When I posted this entry I misidentified the butterfly as an eastern tiger swallowtail. I didn’t know there was such a thing as a two-tailed swallowtail, but as you can see from the first comment on this post, Shelly pointed me in the right direction. Thanks to Shelly, and also to Val Bugh for further confirmation. Live and learn.

© Steven Schwartzman