The wheel turns, another cycle begins … Just last week two of the butterfly chrysalises that we’ve been sheltering emerged. They’re anise swallowtail butterflies. The first one was a male – if you can get a good close look, one set of the black lines on the male’s wings is thicker than on the female’s —
We let him go quickly because the weather was really nice. The anise swallowtails can remain in the chrysalis stage for years. We’ve had some for more than two years. You can tell they’re still alive because if you touch the chrysalis gently it will move. It’s very different with monarch butterflies — the timing for the stages monarchs go through from egg to emergence are always the same.
A day or so later another one of the swallowtails emerged – this one was a female. As we released her I said what I always say to the lady butterflies: “Come back to our garden and leave babies!”
So, as for the cycle of nature turning — today I found three eggs on the fennel in our garden! The native plant the anise swallowtails lay eggs on is called yampah. This great online resource, CalFlora.org, has lots of information about yampah and other native plants. We have some yampah in a pot, but it grows very slowly. Here’s a picture I took last year. The egg is the tiny yellow dot near the center of the picture. It’s about the size of the head of a pin.
Since yampah is very hard to find in the wild around us (not much wild left hereabouts …), the anise swallowtails have turned to the fennel plant, which grows very easily here, to lay its eggs and as its larval food source. Fennel grows in vacant lots and along the highways. Many people cut it down as it gets rangy later in the summer, which is too bad, because they’re probably killing hundreds of swallowtail eggs and caterpillars. Here’s a photo of an egg on fennel:
This is roughly three times larger than life size. These last 2 pictures are from a series I did on the entire life cycle of the anise swallowtail butterfly. You can see all of the photographs on my smugmug gallery.
What butterflies have you been seeing your garden? Do you plant milkweed for monarchs or other plants to attract and feed butterflies?