Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

4th of July Butterfly count
July 14, 2005

On a summer day, visit your garden every hour for ten minutes. Step outside at the first hint of light in the east, and repeat your visits until the last of the colors of sunset have faded. Using the Midland Naturalist’s Summer Butterfly Count as the catalyst, I did just that on July 2nd.

Dynamic clouds varying from pink to orange to silver to white to black framed my early morning observations. As I stepped out the door at 7 a.m. on my second tour, a lone Monarch Butterfly rode the northeasterly outflow winds gusting out of the third set of nighttime thunderheads scudding out of the northwest. Distant thunder, high humidity, and gusty winds did not deter the mockingbirds and kingbirds from their dawn chorus. Vocalizing their joy of surviving the night stimulated hyperactivity.

The kingbirds soared 30 feet above the 30 foot tall Afghan Pines. They faced the wind, frantically flapping, surfing the wind, almost hovering in place. The mockingbirds chased each other, chased English Sparrows, the cat, the dog, and even a hummingbird feeding on the Turk’s Cap. The Monarch made another pass through the garden, but was to never return that day.

The hummingbird busily patrolled the flowerbeds, working its way from the Turk’s Cap, to the Autumn Sage, to the Graham Sage, and to the Flame Acanthus. Dipping their beaks into the blooms, they did needlework with their bills, their wings whirring like a sewing machine. A blue darner dragonfly swooped over a row of orange lantana, disturbing a paper wasp, two honeybees, a black carpenter bee, and several syrphid flies (dainty iridescent blue or green or purple black.) A Fiery Skipper butterfly dangled from the underside of a Turk’s Cap leaf, refusing to join the activity of the morning.

An hour later the thunderstorm brought a spattering of rain accompanied with lightning that struck nearby, cutting power in the house for a brief moment. I stood in the breezeway, out of the rain, watching for the reactions of the wildlife. Whitewinged doves, mourning doves, canyon towhees, and two cardinals perched on interior branches of the Chinese Pistache next to the northern portal of the breezeway. To its north is a row of Afghan Pines, so the Pistache was the most protected environment for the birds, which nervously rearranged their feet at my appearance. No insects moved – not even the single solitary housefly perched on the lattice framing the portal.

The dog Lila joined me again for the next tour. A big orange Queen butterfly perched on a white cultivar of Blue Mist Eupatorium did not move as we approached, not until we were within a foot of it, then it resentfully flapped away to circle around, hoping to land again. It did not land, for we had not moved, but it circled again. I stuck my finger near the blossom, holding it motionless – out of a thousand times I have tried to convince a butterfly to land on my finger I have succeed often enough to keep trying again and again.

Lila leaned against me, intently watching my hand. The butterfly circled back yet again, and began to flutter gently down towards the flower and my finger between the blooms. When the butterfly skittered within 3 inches, Lila lunged and snapped to save me from the fierce butterfly. That convinced the butterfly to seek other patches of Eupatorium and it made a beeline to the flowerbeds around the grill in the ramada (a shade structure with a lath roof.)

At noon, Lila stayed with Deborah, who was painting the handles of the refrigerator after painting the refrigerator itself. 300 doves panicked out of the pines as I emerged, circling the house and landing on the electric lines not far away. Every dove in the neighborhood comes to our garden for water and an afternoon siesta in the pines. I took a seat in the shade, for the sun had turned the day into a sauna, made steamier by the morning’s rain. A dripping faucet in a thicket of Black Locust provides water for the more cautious birds and animals that visit our home.

A dozen blue quail, ten of them three-quarter grown young, slipped into the grove, stopping and starting, peering about carefully. The father quail took up a sentry post beyond the water, nearer to me. The others pecked among the golden rescue grass stalks under the trees, taking turns sipping water from the puddle under the faucet. I watched until all had sated their thirst, when my attention was captivated by a rustle in the pine needle mulch of the flowerbed next to me.

A Southern Prairie Lizard scurried past me, jumped up on the upright brick edging of the flowerbed, scampered along its top, and then leapt to a nearby tree trunk. It finally stopped at the base of the one sunbeam that penetrated the shady nook of the garden. It carefully arranged itself so it could absorb some of the sun’s warmth, and I believed I could see it lighten in color as its chromatophores shrunk as it warmed up. When the species is cool, it is dark brown with gray lines, but when it warms it becomes grayer. I surveyed the shade garden, hoping to spot a Goatweed Leafwing or Buckeye butterfly, as both species spend a significant amount of time in shade.

During the three p.m. tour I visited a Vitex tree in bloom. During the cloudy morning no butterflies had been present, but as the heat built, the blooms released their nectar. A dozen Gray Hairstreak butterflies dominated the white bloom spikes – Vitex is normally bluish-purple, but this tree, a seedling from a nearby purple blossomed tree blooms a week later than its parent. Along the garden path a swarm of Dainty Sulfur butterflies and two species of small orange and black Crescent butterflies danced in the shimmering heat, rapidly and erratically darting from Paper Flowers to Chocolate Daisies to Monarda to Pink Skullcap.

A Whiptail lizard scooted down the path, passing an harvester ant nest. During the rainy morning only a few ants milled at the entry hole, but now their seed gathering highways were experiencing rush-hour traffic. The rain had knocked a substantial quantity of flower seeds to the ground, so the ants worked in overdrive to beat the birds to the bounty.

Beyond the Vitex dragonflies and wasps swarmed over the garden pond. The wasps landed in the water, to sail along pushed by the wind as they sipped water to take back to their paper nests to cool their larvae. Five species of dragonflies zipped back and forth, each claiming the egg-laying territories of their mates. A Kingbird swooped down from the Cottonwood, snapped and snatched one, and rocketed to a dead branch of the tree. It whacked the insect on the branch, snipped off its wings, and fed it to the most frantic of three fledged young perched in a line on a side branch.

Butterfly activity increased with the heat. Two species did not arrive until the evening, however. The bird activity slowed and almost stopped during the heat of the day, but became a whirling melee during the last hour of daylight. At sundown cottontail rabbits timidly hopped into the yard. Lila ignored them, for she had returned to Queen butterfly hunting at the White Blue Mist. Nine Queens swirled around her, nimbly avoiding her snippy snapping.

Wildlife gardening is a mentally participatory activity – a stimulating constant education!