Welcome! This blog is mostly about butterfly gardening, but other types of plants and gardens, as well as
other wildlife is blogged about too.
I found the first set of Monarch eggs in my garden this year today. They had to be laid sometime later this afternoon, because earlier I checked and didn’t see any yet.
I’ve now had three species of butterflies lay eggs this year already. Some Black Swallowtails a while back, duskywings on Sunday and now today, Monarchs.
The eggs are on a few different species of milkweed – swamp, common, purple, whorled and one other one that I need to look up which milkweed it is again. I forgot to check the butterfly weed (A. tuberosa) – just realized that, I’ll check later.
And I haven’t forgotten to get some pictures on here, but just haven’t had time yet!
– Update – I checked – yes, eggs were laid on the Butterfly Weed (A. tuberosa) also! And later I saw a Tiger Swallowtail flying around the garden, first I’ve seen in our yard this year.
Ok, not the type of eggs you are probably thinking of for Easter!
I found more butterfly eggs on Easter morning – some duskywing eggs on my baptisia plant. Ok, technically, duskwings are skippers, not butterflies, but they’re close enough!
I saw her actually laying the eggs when we were getting ready to leave for my Mom’s on Easter. I saw others on the plant had turned orange already, so likely some eggs had been there for a while already. This is either the first or second year that I’ve had duskywings eggs before. For some reason my mind is blank about if I had them lay eggs here before. I have raised some before though, that I got from someplace else.
This Spicebush Swallowtail emerged from its chrysalis – but I only had a chance to get one quick picture of it before it flew away!
My first Black Swallowtail to emerge from its chrysalis did so today. (Actually it is the only Black Swallowtail I had over wintering.) It was a male and I managed to get a few decent pictures of it – here is one of them – on my hand before it flew off:
