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Garden journal entry |
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Urbanus proteus - long-tailed skipper |
October 07, 2017. We're starting to reap the rewards of planting a floriferous garden. In recent weeks, more and more butterflies have paid us visits (and some hummingbirds, too!). I'm delighted to add the gulf fritillary to my list of butterflies I'm on a first-name basis with, with several encounters in the past week, and we've also seen a few swallowtails as well as flighty brown skippers. Today I witnessed a couple of monarchs laying eggs on our milkweed. And when Amy stepped out to take a break from her teacher activities, she spotted the colorful creature in the picture here, which I first mistook for a day-flying moth because of its furry body. Turns out it's a long-tailed skipper – a rather more impressive species than most other skippers I've had the pleasure to meet.
We've really only just started going on our garden, so I hope that with a greater variety of plants and flowers, we'll continue to attract more of these wonderful creatures to our garden in years to come. Now, if only more of our neighbors would join in, we'd have a more continuous butterfly habitat through the neighborhood – for now, it's a few oases in a sea of rather uninspiring (to a butterfly, at least) bermudagrass. |
Last modified:
September 09, 2009
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