Top Photo: Larva on crownbeard. I was expecting to find larvae of silvery checkerspot as I bent down to look at the usually tall, broad-leafed herbaceous plant with misshaped yellow flowers, crownbeard. I always associate crownbeard with that orange and black butterfly, though I’ve never recorded one here at the museum in my 14 some years of walking past these flowers, it does no harm to look. When I see this plant along the Eno River, or other wet areas,Read more
Posts tagged: #crownbeard
Yellow Flowers, Gray Frogs, and Green Caterpillars.
Top Photo: Crownbeard. Crownbeard is a local herbaceous composite, meaning it grows in the area, has no woody stems or branches and has both disk and ray flowers. I refer to it as the unkempt, or messy sunflower. The flowers seem never to be complete. The ray flowers are uneven in shape, and in most cases are missing many petals Yellow crownbeard (Verbesina occidentalis) is common in the piedmont and can be found along roadsides, edges, and water courses. IRead more
Confusing Butterflies
Top Photo: Pearl crescents mate. There are two small, orange and black butterflies in our area that are very similar in appearance and may easily be confused with one another. I’ve gotten them mixed up on more than one occasion. As mentioned, both are orange and black, both fly low to the ground and both can be found in the same habitat, though one prefers wetter areas. First, a warning, the butterflies are variable in pattern and coloration. They don’tRead more
Pearl Crescent and others
In this past week of crisp cool weather, I found many butterflies of many different species. Here are just a handful. Pearl Crescent I’m sometimes asked why this butterfly is named Pearl Crescent. You have to see the underside of the hindwing to get the answer to that question, and this butterfly often pumps its wings up and down while perched, making it difficult to see the underwing. Persistence will get you a glimpse at a small whitish crescent on theRead more
Waning Moon, Yellow Flowers, Borers, a Mantid, and a Slantface
The last five days of September were mostly days full of rain. The 28th, however, was clear, cool and dry. With a waning gibbous moon hanging low in the sky at the start of the day, it turned into perhaps the most comfortable day since sometime in May. Crownbeard and goldenrod are in bloom. Where there is goldenrod, there are insects. Locust Borers (Megacyllene robiniae) can often be found on goldenrod, especially near stands of Black Locust. In the fall, the adultRead more