If You Plant It, They Will Come – Butterflies!

An alternative title for this blog post could be how to create an enchanted garden. An enchanted garden is a garden with butterflies fluttering through it almost non-stop on sunny mid and late summer days. That describes my back yard. Every day in July and August, Monarchs and Cabbage Whites are fluttering through my yard and stopping to sip nectar. I occasionally see other butterflies, including Tiger Swallowtails, Black Swallowtails, Silver-Spotted Skippers, Red Admirals, and Painted Lady butterflies.

This Tiger Swallowtail butterfly is drinking nectar from a zinnia flower in my garden. Notice that one of the “tails” on the swallowtail is missing.

The secret to an enchanted butterfly garden is planting host and nectar plants for the butterflies that you want to visit you. Host plants are plants that the caterpillars eat. For monarchs you need to plant different kinds of milkweed, because milkweed is their host plant and also a nectar plant. I’m growing common milkweed and swamp milkweed. Another kind of milkweed is butterfly weed, which has orange flowers.

A Painted Lady butterfly loves the Mexican sunflower (Tithonia) nectar. I took this photo in my backyard. Hummingbirds also love Mexican sunflower nectar.

Right now, in early August, my common milkweed is finished blooming, so the monarchs and other butterflies are feasting on tall zinnia flowers, butterfly bush flowers, Mexican sunflowers, Joe Pye weed, cosmos, and purple coneflower. I am careful to buy zinnia plants and other flowering plants and seeds that have not been chemically treated, for the well-being of my butterflies. I also do not use chemicals on my grass for the same reason.

This is a Black Swallowtail that I raised this summer. Watching butterflies through their lifecycle is a wonderful adventure! For more information, see my June 14, 2020, post Raising Black Swallowtail Butterflies.

If you want to attract Black Swallowtail butterflies, plant dill, parsley, and fennel, because that is where the black swallowtail lays her eggs, and it is what the caterpillars eat. The butterflies will sip nectar from a variety of flowers.

A rare Red-Spotted Purple butterfly is enjoying my purple coneflowers.

A butterfly that I have only seen twice in my life is a Red-spotted Purple. This gorgeous butterfly, in its caterpillar stage, eats wild cherry, aspens, and poplars. Since I don’t have any of those trees in my yard, that explains why this butterfly is a very rare visitor to my yard. So, if you are thinking about planting a tree, one of those host trees I mentioned will provide larval food for the Red-spotted Purple and may attract them to your yard.

The Silver-Spotted Skipper is absorbing nectar on a butterfly bush flower in my yard.

You may be wondering why I am writing this article at the end of the summer instead of early in the spring. It’s because if you want to plant milkweed for the monarchs, it is best to plant your milkweed seeds in the fall and let them lay in the ground all winter. Milkweed can be tricky to start. There are methods of preparing the milkweed seeds for planting in the spring, but the best chance of success is planting seeds in the fall. Once your milkweed is established, it will come up on its own in late spring or early summer.

A brilliantly colored Monarch is sipping common milkweed flower nectar. The milkweed nectar makes the Monarch poisonous to Monarch predators.

Roll out the welcome mat for caterpillars and butterflies in your yard by planting host and nectar plants especially for them. Even if you don’t have a yard, you can plant zinnias and lantana in pots on a balcony or patio to provide nectar for butterflies. Creating a butterfly sanctuary is a well worth the effort, because you will be rewarded with butterfly friends!

All photos shown in this article were taken by Jenifer Garlitz.

Raising Black Swallowtail Butterflies

I started my adventure raising black swallowtail butterflies last summer when I gave a neighbor some kale, which is abundant in my veggie garden. I asked my neighbor Laura, if she would like some dill from my garden also. She accepted my offer of dill. About twenty minutes later Laura returned to my house with the handful of dill. She said, you’ve got butterfly eggs on this dill! I had never thought to look for butterfly eggs on my dill. Laura had raised monarch butterflies, so she knew what butterfly eggs look like.

I put the dill in a vase of water and watched the tiny eggs, barely visible, turn into tiny caterpillars that munched voraciously on dill plants. I kept adding fresh dill and parsley to the vase, as the little cats (caterpillars) ate. Fortunately, I already had a butterfly enclosure in my basement that had been given to me. I put the vase in the butterfly house on my covered porch where the cats were completely safe. The cats were out of direct sunlight almost all day, until late afternoon. Every few days I cleaned out the vase, and cleaned the bottom of the enclosure to clean up the caterpillar poop which is called frass. The caterpillars got bigger, but they also looked much different from the first stage of their caterpillar life, to the next stage.

My first caterpillar, when he became plump, became very active all of a sudden. He stopped eating and crawled all around the enclosure. Then he became very still. Being a first time butterfly mom, I was worried that there was something wrong with my caterpillar. However, the next day he attached himself to a stick that I put on the floor of the enclosure. Then I saw the chrysalis. It started out plump, and then shrank in size. It was 8 days from the time I saw the eggs until my first cat became a chrysalis. After nine days, butterfly number one emerged from the chrysalis. Like any new mom, I just couldn’t get enough pictures of my amazing butterfly! I watched it and talked to it, until its wings dried about two hours later. When it started becoming active after two hours, I knew it was ready to be released. I invited my friend Emma to come and watch the release of my first butterfly.

I kept an eye on three caterpillars on a dill plant in my garden. (See first photo). When it looked like they might be in trouble because a dill stem was dangling, I took them in. Caterpillar number two decided to make his chrysalis on a stem of dill, instead of a stick on the bottom of the enclosure. I didn’t know what to do because I didn’t know how I could keep a stem of dill alive for nine days. After doing some research on the internet, I decided to remove the chrysalis from the dill stem and glue it on a stick. I discovered that the silk strings holding the chrysalis on the stem are very strong, although they look delicate. After painstakingly removing the chrysalis from the stem, I tried to glue it onto a stick. This did not work. Then I went back to the internet and found out that for black swallowtail chrysalises, they will be fine just lying on the bottom of the enclosure; they don’t need to be suspended. I worried that I hurt the poor chrysalis because I handled it so much, but thankfully it survived!

The fourth black swallowtail that I raised successfully, I named Charlie. Charlie was extra special because he is the only caterpillar that I handled, and when I picked him up, he did not poke out his antennae at me. Black swallowtail caterpillars are unique in that they show when they are afraid by poking out their little red antennae. Maybe Charlie was not afraid of me because I talked to him a lot. So the first time I picked up Charlie was when he was trying to explore his world. He was gathering all of his courage to try to drop from the dill plant in the vase, to the bottom of the butterfly enclosure. He kept at it for a long time, reaching downward with his little body, and then retreating to the safety of the dill plant. Finally, I couldn’t watch Charlie struggle any longer without helping him; I picked him up and set him down on a stiff gardening glove that I put on the floor of the enclosure for a caterpillar ladder. The next problem was that Charlie went up instead of down on his caterpillar ladder. So I picked him up again and got him headed in the right direction. Finally he crawled all around the enclosure to choose a perfect place to make a chrysalis. The third time I picked up Charlie it was because he chose to make his chrysalis right in the middle of the zipper on the door of the enclosure. This was not going to work because butterfly number three would need to be released before Charlie emerged as a butterfly. While Charlie was very still, but had not yet made a chrysalis, I moved him to the end of the zipper. He apparently thought this was a suitable place to make a chrysalis.

I had suspected that Charlie would be born as a butterfly on August 20th, because I noticed a subtle change in the color of the chrysalis the evening before. The chrysalis darkened. I was delighted to spend time with Charlie as a butterfly when he emerged early in the morning. Of course, I took lots of pictures. I wanted to release Charlie, but he wasn’t quite ready to fly yet because his wings were still drying. I needed to leave for work, so I called my friend Gwen for her to watch Charlie fly away. Charlie landed on her before he flew away!

I think that Charlie came back to say hi to me a few days after he was born. I have lots of monarch butterflies fluttering through my yard, but not so many black swallowtails. The colors matched Charlie’s colors, so I’m fairly certain it was Charlie. I’m a proud butterfly mama!

In order to help the black swallowtail butterflies, plant dill, parsley, and fennel, because these are the host plants of  black swallowtails.  Also, don’t use any chemicals on your lawn or on your garden plants. I recommend the following nectar plants for butterflies: zinnias, Mexican sunflowers, common milkweed, swamp milkweed, butterfly weed, and purple coneflowers.

This final photo is my butterfly “Charlie.”

All photos shown in this article were taken by Jenifer Garlitz.

American Bullfrog

Lithobates catesbeianus (Image courtesy of National Aquarium, Baltimore, MD)

Several years ago, I was greatly impressed by a podcast about Leonardo DaVinci. The guest on the public radio show said something to the effect that we could all be like DaVinci. Perhaps we all couldn’t attain his artistic talent, but we could, like Leonardo, learn from the natural world around us simply by being astute, patient observers. DaVinci’s genius, using principles gleaned from nature, imagined the ornithopter, diving suit and automaton, among other fanciful and futuristic inventions. As I said, greatly impressed. Also influenced. At least that’s how I justify what might otherwise be viewed as my juvenile penchant for wading in streams, netting small critters, and introducing them into the miniature worlds of my aquariums. It’s not play; it’s science. I’m following DaVinci’s lead.

Last summer, under the guise of channeling his multidisciplinary renaissance mind, I got myself a couple of tadpoles. (You thought this was going to be turtles, didn’t you?). I brought them home and put them into a community tank with six goldfish and a golden shiner. Feeling confident that they would winter over in the 50-gallon tank, I planned to release them in the spring. But there is that thing Robert Burns said about best laid schemes oft going awry. They do.

Over the months, one tadpole grew, eventually sprouting back legs, with those legs becoming more functional each day. It grew front legs. This froglet (a metamorphosing frog that still retains a tail) now sat on plants at the top of the water breathing air, while the other tadpole showed little sign of advancing beyond its aquatic stage. Some tadpoles, lacking the amphibian equivalent of human leptin, will remain tadpoles for their entire lives. So it was that by February I had one tadpole and one little frog, identified – incorrectly – as a leopard frog.

Caring for Frog got old very quickly. It was difficult to keep his new terrarium home clean and I didn’t enjoy the constant trips to the pet store for live crickets. But most importantly, I didn’t want to do harm to this little creature that I kidnapped from his natural environment to satisfy my selfish, albeit DaVinci-inspired, curiosity. I made a commitment to return Frog to the outdoors as soon as possible.

Eventually, after an interminably long winter, frog-song – one of my favorite sounds in the world – could be heard on the evening air. As planned, I netted Frog, put him into a large plastic jar, and took the little bugger for a walk. After a quarter mile’s hike, we reached the pre-determined spot. I set the jar in the water at the pond’s edge for a few minutes, letting Frog adapt to the temperature. Then, I tipped the jar on its side and Frog jumped out. And there I left him, confident that he would be a great little frog.

I continued my springtime walk, but on the way back up the path, I stopped at the point where Frog and I had veered off to go to the pond. I hesitated, wondering if Frog was well hidden and safe. There was no need for lengthy agonizing on this quandary. Knowing myself, I just surrendered to the impulse and went to check on him. To my great relief, Frog was nowhere to be seen. A successful launch. And then that best laid schemes thing happened again. As so many parents have experienced, the kid came back. I reasoned it must have been a random jump that put Frog inches from where I was standing. And random timing. Unwilling to accept the situation as it seemed to be unfolding, I waved my arms over Frog in imitation of a swooping hawk. Frog stayed put. I made like a stalking heron and got the same result. Frog sat at my feet unfazed. Finally, I tempted fate by plunking the jar down in the water a few inches in front of Frog. Don’t tempt fate. It rarely goes well. Frog swam into the jar. Somewhere, Robert Burns is surely smiling.

Frog, I learned, is an American bullfrog. In many parts of the world the American bullfrog – the largest of the North American frogs – is considered an invasive species. Their native habitat reaches from Canada to Florida and from the Atlantic to the Rockies. On the endangered species scale it is considered of least concern. The National Wildlife Federation and National Museum websites tell us that bullfrogs eat just about anything that moves and fits in their mouths – including other bullfrogs. Unlike the attentive young-rearing practices of the African bullfrog (immortalized on video narrated by Sir David Attenborough), American bullfrog parents provide zero protection to their eggs or tadpoles and will even eat them. American bullfrog parents set a pretty low bar. It is probably because females typically lay 20,000 eggs at a time that the species is so successful. I was no longer feeling such a bullfrog parenting failure. Bullfrog reproduction evolved to suffer huge losses. I just didn’t want my particular bullfrog to become one of those losses.

Frog is back home with me. He is in a more maintainable enclosure now. He is also a she. You can tell the sex of American bullfrogs by the size of their tympanum—the membrane covering their ears. The tympanum of male bullfrogs is larger than their eye, while the tympanum of females tends to be smaller than their eye. Commercial bullfrog farming websites inform me that it will be two years before Frog is fully grown and that she may live 8-10 years. That’s a lot of crickets. While American bullfrogs are voracious eaters, they will only eat moving prey. I don’t think I have that kind of DaVincian curiosity or endurance. Instead, I will wait until I hear the species’ signature jug-o-rum call and then take Frog again out for a walk. I hope this time she has the instincts to avoid predators and the hazards of life in the wild. Successful or not, she will fulfill her role as nature intended.

“Frog” today (Photo taken by Tracy Panepinto)

“Frog” as a froglet (Photo taken by Tracy Panepinto)