Paw Paws | Winged Beauty Butterflies

Red-Spotted Purple butterfly photographed by Jeff Zablow at Raccoon Creek Park, PA, 8/24/07

Our move from Pittsburgh to Georgia has produced a whole lot of change. Most of that change is welcome and appreciated. I do not miss the 2 feet to 3 feet of snow, and I continue to respect all of you who deal with icy mornings with grace and ease. I never did realized how much of my speech is sprinkled with Brooklynese, until I landed here in Eatonton in central Georgia’s Piedmont region.

I adore, heavy adore the ability to begin working in your garden in the beginning of February, and continuing to tend garden into the end of November. That’s long be my life’s dream, and I love it.

I’m not missing as much as I thought I’d be. The native nurseries (Nearly Native in Fayetteville, Night Song in Canton, and Beechwood Natives in Lexington are excellent. The state parks, wildlife refuges and National wildlife refuges beckon. The medical professionals are not what I expected, they’re excellent and well equipped, not backward and primitive as I feared.

The daily legions of butterflies that we see each day in my 85% natives garden just thrill us! My dreams of having my own hackberry, pussy toes, sassafras trees, Atlantic white cedars, paw paws, tulip poplars, lead trees, Hercules clubs, mountain mints, milkweeds, crotons, passionflowers, pipevines . . . delight!

We are seeing fewer of the trail buddies that I used to love back north, like this Red-spotted Purple. I’m kind of missing them, that kept this lone trail hiker company, always reminding that I was for sure now alone . . . .

Jeff

Zebra swallowtail butterflies photographed by Jeff Zablow at Mason's Neck State Park, VA. Jeff blogs about the art and science of butterflies at http://www.wingedbeauty.com

With our recent focus on Zebras, Zebra heliconian butterflies, I’ve included Zebra swallowtail butterflies, but did not share images of those zebras. Let’s remedy that here.

At a small sandy beach at Mason Neck State Park in Virginia, on the shore of magnificent Chesepeake Bay, was where I happened onto this! Zebra Swallowtail butterflies, motionless and locked together in embrace. They were both very shmeksy! Zebras, with reds, blues, that hard to describe whitish-yellow and black framing all. Not ever seen such a coupled pair since.

Funny this. After spending 13 or so summers as a boy with my Grandparents, the Polisars in their very sweet little bungalow just one block from the beach at Beach 65th Street, Arverne, Queens, New York (AKA Rockaway Beach), the beach etiquette was unwritten but universal, leave couples locked in embrace alone. Steer the widest berth, and move on. The world was complicated then too, and I guess time away from life’s ying & yangs was understood.

This pair of Eurytides marcellus remained this way for more than ½ an hour, barely moving at all. The memory of Splendor on the Beach when I was a kid, made me feel a mite sheepish about moving as close as I had to with my Canon 2.8/100mm lens. Truth be told.

Predators left them, vulnerable as they are here, alone, for those Paw Paws they consume earlier in life make them toxic to the mouth of any fool bird or insect or lizard that might have the opportunity. Amazing, No?

Jeff