Butterfly Bait

Butterfly Bait better known as Dwarf Poinciana

 Flying Flowers on our Flowers... Gulf Fritillary  click here to read about the Poinciana tree in Florida 

We have clouds of these guys right now, on all the flowers and they are laying eggs on the Passion Flower.

More Gulf Fritillary are On the Way.... can you see the look he gave me?

Found another one

 Our Gulf Fritillary catepillars are hale and hearty and I found another Chrysalis, it has been there for several days. It seems to be hidden from our Lizards.

Sunday Miracle

Saturday I read TexWisGirl post Have you fed your flowers?   DO NOT MISS IT  She was talking about feeding butterflies fruit. I grabbed this basket and hung it on the fence and put a sliced banana in it late yesterday.

Sunday at 7:51 AM I found this Gulf Fritillary caterpillar hanging on the chain over the bananas.

In ONE HOUR this little guy hung upside down, and started to swing  back and forth, while I stood and stared and of course Snapped! from above  to below in under and hour. I checked on the web and found this info.
Gulf Fritillary (Agraulis vanillae) caterpillar sheds skin to reveal a fresh chrysallis underneath. The swinging motion is to shed the skin. it only took 10 minutes to go from caterpillar to below.

 just a few hours and  it looked like this, if you enlarge the below photo you can see the outline of the wings.

15 days and we should see a butterfly.  I can't WAIT

I found 8 Zebra and 4 Gulf Fritillary caterpillars. I have not been able to stop watching as they strip the leaves.

WELL, YES, OF COURSE THERE WILL BE MORE PICS
this is what i saw while watching my Sunday Miracle, I found this on YOUTUBE, and hope to see this myself.

Gulf Fritillary Mating Dance II

They left the fence dance and dropped to the ground in front of the bucket garden. Here they are.
to see all my post on our butterflies go to labels on sidebar. Click on photo to enlarge for details

The caterpillar does all the work but the butterfly gets all the publicity. ~Attributed to George Carlin

Butterflies are self propelled flowers. ~R.H. Heinlein

Oh the joys of digital SLR cameras. Or at least it is for ME....

Gulf Fritillary Mating Dance

Photo's from the camera with no edits except cropping. Today "In the Air" Saturday will be On the ground.

Life can be just plain amazing! Yesterday, Hubby yelled in the back door, "come quick, bring the camera". For me that is a battle cry, so I rushed out the door with Rebel in hand and this is what I found.
The Gulf Fritillaries are HERE! they came to the Incubator Bob trained up the fence (for that story click here)  OR the easy way to see about all the Species that have visited us is click on the label Butterflies on the side bar.

This is a second post because I can't wait until Saturday... toooooo excited.....
For 4 short minutes, with my camera on sport mode and burst, I snapped and snapped and snapped.

For info on these butterflies and to see what will be happening in our back yard for the next few weeks
go here  Life Cycle of Gulf Fritillary

Passion Vine Incubator

Above is a Gulf Fritillary Butterfly from last year. When I snapped the photo, I had no idea it was a female laying her eggs on the passion vine incubator.

3 weeks ago, I saw Bobby Appleseed with the machete headed into our jungle, he chopped a palm frond, cleaned it to a stick and went over to the fence behind the bucket garden, and pounded it into the ground.

He said I found a passion vine and am training it up the fence for the Gulf Fritterarys

Above shows the vine is almost to the top of the fence.

this is one of the little curly cues that cling to the dead frond stick...so cute

this is what the passion flower looks like. Last year we found by accident the Passion Plant is the incubator for for the Gulf Fritillary Butterfly.

Now we Wait... today we saw THREE of them and one went to the vine and laid her eggs on it. Just like last year.

If you missed the story  on the Gulf Fritillary Click Here for the story of how we found out we had an incubator

to see all our butterflies, we have 5 species that come each year, click on butterflies label on side bar