Butterfly and Wildlife Gardening And Photography In Houston Texas
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Category Archives: Giant Swallowtail I’ve got lots of news to share (especially since it’s been so long since I have posted), but only 1 picture. Let me start with what all is occurring in the backyard. The Monarch Butterflies have arrived, but unfortunately I’ve only seen 1-2. The Ruby Throated Hummingbirds just arrived today (March 19). There is one…  We’ve had lots of butterflies roaming around the yard but I have posted many pictures of them. We are seeing a good supply of Gulf Fritillary, Monarch Butterflies, Skippers, and Giant Swallowtail Butterflies. Last year during the drought, these common butterflies made very rare appearances. The Zinnias have so much nectar that the Giant Swallowtail…  We have several Butterfly Bushes across the yard and they tend to be magnets for Butterflies. A new visitor for this season was a Giant Swallowtail Butterfly. This Butterfly was so enamored with this particular Butterfly Bush I could barely get a few pictures. It would visit one section of the plant, then fly to… I know I’ve been posting lots of bird pictures, but the Butterfly pictures are coming as well. We have lots of little Monarch Caterpillars right now from the single female that we saw a couple of weeks ago. We also have lots of little Caterpillars from the Eastern Black Swallowtail. I simply ran out of…  I didn’t get a chance to take any photos today, so I’m posting one that I took yesterday, which is the same day of our first migrating Monarch Butterfly from Mexico. Our Wildflower Garden is really blooming now and I’ve noticed at least two types of Butterflies have been visiting. The Eastern Black Swallowtail and…  Each year during late November and early December, the Lemons on our Improved Meyer Lemon tree are ripe for the picking. If you live in the Houston area and are looking for a super easy-to-grow fruit tree, I’d really recommend this one. Other than providing a little fertilizer, we don’t do anything special for this…  Holy Cow! Today there were Butterflies everywhere in the backyard. We had a Monarch, Question Mark, Variegated Fritillary, Giant Swallowtail, Gray Hairstreak, Eastern Black Swallowtail, some type of Crescent Butterfly, and a Pipevine Swallowtail. I got a few pictures, but I missed several and several others weren’t that good as I got over-excited. The plants…  I’ve never, ever, been able to get any pictures of a Giant Swallowtail while it was flying. Today must be my lucky day. In this first photo, the Butterfly was flying in front of a Sago Palm. The Palm makes an interesting background to me. In this second picture, the Giant Swallowtail was flying by…  This Giant Swallowtail Caterpillar has been really growing. Before taking the picture I touched the Caterpillar and it shot out its Osmeterium (two antennae). Shortly after I took this picture I went back so look at it, and it was gone. Hopefully a wasp didn’t get it.  I managed to get some decent Giant Swallowtail pictures today while it was feeding on nectar plants. In this first image, the Swallowtail is getting nectar from one of our Penta plants. These next two images are “almost” the same, but one of them contains a notorious Butterfly Caterpillar killer. These pictures are a little…  I thought I’d provide a little backyard Butterfly update. We haven’t seen any Monarch Butterflies, but we do have 9 Caterpillars from the one Monarch from Mexico. To give the Caterpillars the best chance of success, I have quarantined them in our Butterfly Enclosure. I did this to protect the Caterpillars from predatory wasps and…  As I mentioned in a previous post, today was the best day so far this year in terms of Butterfly Watching in our backyard. We saw a Monarch (it never did land on our Milkweed), Gulf Fritillary, and a Giant Swallowtail. I also noticed that one of Monarch eggs had hatched, and another should hatch… I thought I would put together some brief videos on how to create a successful Butterfly Garden for my last day of vacation. There are a total of 5 videos, each one is less than 2 minutes long. Watching these should give you a decent idea of how to start (or continue) a successful Butterfly…  I learned something today that really blew me away. We had 5 shrubs out front, what I thought were Mock Orange plants. I always liked these plants for a couple of reasons. One they smell great in the Summer, and second, they attract Giant Swallowtail Butterflies and Hummingbird Moths. This past Winter they seemed to… Although we didn’t see many birds at Armand Bayou, we did see quite a few Turtles (Red Eared Sliders) and Giant Swallowtail Butterflies. If you click on this picture and view it full size, you’ll see there’s a little Blue Dragonfly on one of the plants growing out of the pond. I didn’t notice that… |
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