NO SUMMER WITHOUT

Female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

No summer is complete without the appearance of butterflies in the yard. After some much needed rain earlier this week the numbers suddenly went up and it wasn’t difficult to spot quite a few. The master of the show for me is often the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. The female in the photo above took a little time on each purple cone flower and gave me some good opportunities to point the lens at her. Other than the Giant Swallowtails. Three of them were feeding in the flower bed in front of the house erratically with fast beating wings. A fast shutter speed is key for freezing the action and getting a sharp shot.

I’m not a real macro photographer but still like some storytelling about summer with butterflies or other insects and often try to include a bit of their habitat.

Giant Swallowtails

For the first time I used the Nikon Nikkor Z 100-400 f/4.5-5.6 VR S lens for this kind of shooting. Very little or no cropping is a big benefit for me. The zoom range of the lens allows to go wider quickly if a scene requires it, while 400mm gives you enough distance to stay away and not disturb the insect.

Red Admiral

Giant Swallowtail

All images: Nikon Z6 III, Nikon NIKKOR Z 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6 VR S

THE TWO WE SEE FIRST

Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta)

I’m a little behind the time curve with today’s blog post due to several reasons but I still like to share these two photos with you, despite they were created already two weeks ago.

These two butterfly species are the first ones we can find here on the bluffs above the Little Maquoketa Valley in spring. The Mourning Cloak sometimes shows up as early as the snow thaws and this year it was even in February. It’s not an abundant butterfly, but we see them every spring after they emerge from hibernation.

The Red Admiral shows up a bit later and although we don’t have a lot of their preferred larval food plant here, sting nettles, their larvae will probably find plenty of them somewhere else.

You might expect that this was created with a macro lens but I was actually out for some bird photography, with the 150-600 plus teleconverter on camera. Both butterflies used the same tree at the same time to get some exposure to the sun. Two easy shots of the two we see first every spring…

Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa)

NATURE CLICKS #532 - RED ADMIRAL

As summer comes to an end I realize that we didn’t have a great year for larger butterflies here on top of the bluffs along the Little Maquoketa Valley. Yes, in early summer we had thousands of Hackberry Emperors again, most likely due to to the abundance of Hackberry trees around here, but a lot less of any kind swallowtail butterflies. However, today I saw this Red Admiral in the front yard. The photo was made at one of our Autumn Joy Sedums. This flower seems to be a preferred feeding plant for many insects. We see large numbers of bumble bees, different species of wasps, all kinds of bugs, ants, and for the first time in years even some real bees. This is good news. We have lots of other flowers but the nectar of the sedum must be good or they like how easy the access is. The admiral let me get really close with the Nikkor Z 24-70. Not a macro lens but capable to deliver the environmental shot I mostly prefer.