We're Just Wild About Harry! Plus More Wild Times in the Garden.

         Go Day. Moving Time. Where's Waldo? Few days bring more excitement and worry than the day the caterpillars, (now named Tom, Dick, and Harry) having fattened as much as they can fatten themselves, leave their host plant, bronze fennel, and head out into a garden world they have never seen to find a place for metamorphosis. Black Swallowtails, it turns out, have a primal urge to bolt, and to get as far away as fast as they can. Ours went 15-20 feet in about ten minutes, even counting rollovers and bathroom breaks. 

   The first mover was Harry. We had read that these guys like to find firm woody branches angled to about 45%. Fun fact: Caterpillars can't read. Harry went into the roof-shaped top of the garden and eventually climbed up the flimsy vertical stalks of the supertunias, where he settled in for the night, 
     Come the dawn, he got straight to work on his spinning. Not a cocoon, but a sort of hammock or sling. His head arched left and right, and arched back pulling everything tight, between his feet and  the stalk, and finally settling in to a tight vertical J against the stalk. In this position he settled. 

        Reportedly, the Black Swallowtail caterpillars might take 48 hours to transform into a chrysalis, so we returned to the fennel in time to find that Tom had already started his travels. It was shocking -- he was like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. He climbed the rock wall bordering the garden, traversed the drainage ditch, sampled and rejected the impatiens under the baby magnolia, and was about to head for the grass when we had enough and brought him back, placing him under a butterfly bush possessing perfect woody stems at a 45% pitch. He escaped again. Carrying him on a leaf, we offered a high leaf in the hydrangea. Nope. He leapt to the ground below,  problem solved his way over a slippery hose, before finally picking, like Harry, a thin vertical stack in a low flower, calendula. 

     And darn it, while all that was going on, Dick fled unseen. And we have no clue where he ended up. 

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      Meanwhile, the rest of the garden was not quiet, not in the least, as common, rare, and previously unseen visitors flew in. The rare one is the American Snout, which possesses, you guessed it, very elongated mouth parts, which help it mimic a leaf and thereby camouflage itself.  

And here we offer a clearer view of this unusual butterfly, more often found in the woods on trees. 

     Our unique visitor is the female Diana Fritillary butterfly, which we have encountered only once before along the Bridal Veil Falls trail. We often see the orange and brown male, but the female by all accounts stays to the woods, waiting for the male to find her there. The female looks nothing like the male, being patterned like a Black Swallowtail.  

     And here, below. is the male Diana from July 3rd.  

     It was a dark and stormy night, Bulwer-Lytton fans, so we did not get out until about 11 AM this morning to check on everyone. Tragedy! HARRY WAS GONE. How could this be possible? He was not in a conspicuous area. Thrushes have not been in the garden so far this season. We searched, zoomed in with long lenses, poked gently around, but could find no sign of him. . 
     Despondent, we found a milk crate to put over Tom, still snuggled on his stalk, before whatever did in Harry could eat him too!
      Later this afternoon, Rick returned to the crime scene one last time, looking for forensic evidence, like traces of silk on a stem. He gently moved one stem at a time. Then lo and behold ...
      Can you find it? (Hint: Look for the threads we saw him spinning)

         WAY ahead of schedule, Harry had transformed into a chrysalis, and gravity had dropped him from the 9 o'clock relative position on the stem to the 6 o'clock position, blending him into the foliage amazingly well, especially in the flat light post-storm. Here are other views. 

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        Capping the day, at dusk we were visited by our dear friend (we knew his father too last season), the peculiar and stubborn and very territorial Red Admiral, vanessa atalantis.  More fun facts: 1) The Red Admiral is the only butterfly that comes at twilight and we have never seen one during the day; 2) The Red Admiral, in a dozen visits, has never supped from a single flower; 3) The Red Admiral is the only butterfly that divebombs us, lands on us, sits in our chairs, and otherwise perches imperiously to defend his twilit territory and his exclusive access to the female Red Admiral, which we have never seen. Scientific papers have been written about his territorial behavior towards butterflies. We have found nothing about his territorial behavior towards humans. A very long blog post about this in much greater detail is in our future. 
     Tonight he ended up perching for  about five minutes atop the highest butterfly bush. He does not mind our getting in close with cameras. He is not afraid. After all, he is Lord of this Domain. 

       The poor Cabbage White gets no ink but lots of love. We will close with a shot of this peripatetic flyer. Goodnight Garden. Goodnight Moon.