You are browsing the archives of butterflies.

Monarch Butterflies, as they do every fall, are heading south for the winter.  Along the coast one can see pretty big numbers of them, especially on days when wind out of the north carries them to the shore.  I am always amazed by long migrations, but it is usually birds I think of when considering [...]

I spent yesterday in Toronto and nipped across to the Islands - a small group of now-stabilised sandbars a short ferry ride from downtown - looking for migrants. A combination of my jet-lag and the Islands’ slowly turning into a loud and brash amusement park contributed to the feeling that either most of North America’s [...]

Two of the more recognizable butterflies of the northeastern United States were kindly enough to pause in front of my camera lens of late, the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) and the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus).  Both are bigger butterflies than the skippers I’ve recently seen, and both are strikingly colored and rather common, but, [...]

As I mentioned in my previous post the last visit I made to Forest Park was relatively birdless but the bugs did their best to make up for the lack of birds.  In particular, the area around the reclamation pond was quite buggy, with the water and numerous wildflowers creating quite the habitat for everything [...]

Monday was a well-spent vacation day.  Why?  Well, Charlie was in town and we went birding at Jamaica Bay!  I’ll leave it to Charlie to tell the tale of the birds we saw and didn’t see and stick to three of the insects that we spotted: a fly, a butterfly, and a cicada.  Charlie also [...]

When I was not revelling in numerous species of terns yesterday (June 19th) I spent a happy hour on Po Toi trying to photograph some of the island’s stunning butterflies. One in particular I spent a while trying to sneak up on was the large, bright, and very active Red Lacewing Cethosia biblis: I’m glad [...]

Have you been to Lenoir Preserve in Yonkers lately? Probably not. After all, unless you live in the northwest Bronx or any of the rivertowns along the Hudson, you probably take your leisure in more convenient natural settings. But Lenoir, seat of the Hudson River Audubon chapter, has always been a special place for me, [...]

As a person who is still relatively new to the world of birding I feel that I have made some pretty big strides in figuring out the wide variety of birds that I see and hear. I might not identify them all but I definitely manage to put a name to the vast majority that [...]

The acquisition of a new field guide is always a joyous occasion, signaling either an impending journey or impending answers to old questions. By the latter, I’m referring to those unclosed cases that accumulate any time a nature lover ventures outdoors armed with a camera but not a clue. As you can imagine, my digital [...]

Along with the expected assortment of bird books for Christmas, I received a butterfly guide, specifically the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies. Readers of this blog know that I, like so many birders before me, am developing a growing interest in the invertebrate life I encounter in my travels. Dragonflies and [...]