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Birding Insects Photography

Butterflies Galore

Today I drove out to a place I call 8115 Arroyo. It seems to have no name on maps but there is BLM Road 8115 that goes to it, so I have made a name for it. I’ve been watching the summer monsoon storms on radar for the last three or four months and this area has got quite a lot of rain. It shows too, the vegetation in the arroyo is lush and green, the spiny hackberry are loaded with green fruit that is just starting to ripen and should be attracting birds soon. The numbers of butterflies was amazing. It was mostly American Snouts and Cloudless Sulphurs, but I also saw Queens, Sonoran Metalmarks, Empress Leilia, Southern Dogface, Mexican Yellows, Gray Hairstreak, Leda Ministreak, and Pipevine Swallowtail. I saw my first ever caterpillar of a Pipevine Swallowtail too. The abundance of American Snouts was just amazing, sometimes hundreds on a single plant.

I don’t think I have seen this before, at least not in flower. Texas Virgin’s Bower, Clematis drummondii. There was lot of it flowering in 8115 Arroyo. Butterflies seemed to ignore it though.
Here’s the Pipevine Swallowtail caterpillar. I had to post it on BugGuide to find out what it was. It is a large caterpillar, it was on Chuckwalla Delight. Throughout the arroyo, Chuckwalla Delight was attracting lots of butterflies.
I can walk by hundreds of butterflies of many species but when I find a Sonoran Metalmark I have to start taking photos. The flower is Chuckwalla’s Delight.
It isn’t often I can get shots of the underside of a Sonoran Metalmark, the light wasn’t very good here.
I took more photos of the Lewis’s Woodpeckers at the golf course, now there are four of them.
A Cloudless Sulphur nectaring on Hummingbird Trumpet.

One reply on “Butterflies Galore”

That place sounds like a butterfly wonderland. I didn’t know pipevine swallowtail caterpillars looked like that!

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