Interesting things you can do with a Butterfly

Butterflies are not just for looking at 🙂

This is a post for the friends that I have made in the last few months, friends who have never seen this blog in the summertime.

Winter is so difficult for nature bloggers, it’s a wonder that we post anything. There is a different world coming and it is beautiful.

Butterflies have been big in my world this weekend. On Saturday I discovered a beautiful Small Tortoiseshell overwintering in my flat.

Sunday was a beautiful sunny day here and while I was out a Comma flew in front of me.

This isn’t the one that I saw yesterday, that was over a hedge and lost in a field almost as soon as I saw it. This is just a picture of another Comma.
It is still much too early for Butterflies, there are no nectar plants about yet but it is okay they will just go back to sleep for a bit.

The Butterflies will be here in four weeks. It isn’t very long to wait.

It is not very unusual to see Butterflies here in the winter. Whilst many species overwinter as Caterpillars or as a Chrysalis we have five local species that overwinter as adult butterflies and they can wake up and have a little fly around on any warm winters day.

The other three are: The Red Admiral.

The Brimstone.The Peacock.

So what can you do with Butterflies besides look at them?

You can abduct them and raise them as your own 🙂

The Small Tortoiseshell is probably the first one that you will find.

These are little yellow caterpillars that live in colonies on Stinging Nettles. If you want to try raising Butterflies in a different part of the world, pick a species that has an easy to obtain food plant, they eat a lot.

I made some mistakes when raising these and so I shall share the wisdom gained.

I chose large caterpillars, thinking that they would be quicker to raise than little ones. Most of my Caterpillars died and it wasn’t that much fun.

They died because they had already been attacked before I found them. In the wild there are a lot of insects that lay their eggs in Caterpillars and the larva grow inside and eat the Caterpillar.

This is a Tachinid fly injecting it’s eggs into a Small Tortoiseshell Caterpillar.

Pelatachina tibialis, Nasty little beast.
So I did successfully raise Small Tortoiseshells but it wasn’t as much fun as I had hoped. Lesson Learnt, I went out to collect some Peacock Larvae.

Take the smallest ones that you can find, the less time they have been in the wild the less chance that they will have been got at.

Peacocks are the little black ones that also live on Stinging Nettles.

I only took a few, I thought, it turned out that I had about forty in my little jar and from those I released thirty three Butterflies, many more than would have made it if I had left them in the wild.

Now you can buy Butterfly raising kits. I don’t really like these. The most common species is the Painted Lady and this is because the Painted Lady can eat artificial food. So you generally get five little Caterpillars in  a jar and the bottom of the jar is smeared with artificial food, there is a piece of paper under the lid for them to attach themselves to and the jar is otherwise empty.

This is a horrible way to raise Caterpillars, in an empty jar. It deprives them of their youth. I am going to show you that Caterpillars are lively, intelligent animals. They have a social structure and they get great joy from swinging about in the jungle that is their home.

This is how I am going to do it.

Make them a home.

The tray of mud is because the nettles will need water but I can’t put them in water or the Caterpillars will drown themselves.

That is it. You don’t really have to worry about the Caterpillars escaping, they will stay on the food plant so long as you keep them provided with fresh greens.

I admit, I came down one morning and found this.

What on earth is going on here?

We are going to join the circus.

You bloomin’ well are not!

They had plenty of leaves they just weren’t fresh enough for them. You do have to keep on top of them.

Most of the time they like to hang together.

Although you do get the odd little one that has a mind of it’s own.

They grow very quickly and they moult their skin four times. Each time that they moult there is a bigger and more beautiful Caterpillar inside.

Those are not dead baby Caterpillars in the next picture, they are just the discarded skins. The little black spots are called frasse and they are Caterpillar poo. They eat a lot, so guess what else they do a lot 🙂

You need to clean them out regularly as well as change their leaves.

It won’t be long before you want to take these beautiful animals out for a photo shoot.

Now things are about to get interesting and we have a problem.

When they are in their final moult they will decide to leave the food plant. They are going to shed their skin one more time but this time there will be a chrysalis inside and so now they have done eating and they need to spread out.

My solution was to put them in my kitchen cupboard. (This might be a problem if you live with a partner)

My clever little animals knew what was expected of them and they hung themselves all around their new home.

Watch the Caterpillar shed it’s skin one last time. I have speeded this up X4 because the whole process took six minutes.

The Caterpillars now make themselves a little sticky pad of silk to hang from and the most critical moment of this final moult is the very last bit when the chrysalis must abandon it’s old skin and attach itself to the silk pad. That is what all the twisting at the end of this video is about.

What happens now is a miracle. The Caterpillar will completely dissolve inside it’s chrysalis, only a few cells remain and from these cells a Butterfly grows. Something really wonderful.

This next video is speeded up x2.

Now I just have to show you how to pick up a Butterfly and then we can let them go.

Never touch it’s wings. They are covered with very fine scales that will be displaced if you try to pick it up that way, the Butterfly needs these scales, they are not just for shimmering colour.

Put your hand in front of the Butterfly and invite it to step on.

So long as you are known to the Butterflies this works every time.

If the Butterflies don’t know who you are then try rescuing a Butterfly Princess from the long grass, this will earn you a reputation  as a friend of the Butterflies and then it will be easy.

Now it is time to say goodbye.

Today the sun is shining and it feels like April. Fizz and I are going to look for Butterflies.

Sunday (Phew! What a Scorcher)

Now, I have sat down here to write a post for you and beside me there is a steaming mug of black coffee and a large glass of whiskey. This is not good, I don’t do my best writing when I am drinking black coffee. I have taken a sensible precaution and I have written “Don’t Ramble” on the back of my hand in Biro. So now if you are sitting comfortably, I will begin….

Yesterday started well. Saturday had been as warm as a late Spring day and Sunday looked just as promising. So we had to ask ourselves, “what will we do with all of this sunshine?” We can scour the woods for fungi when it’s raining, we decided to go and look for butterflies instead.

It was a long shot given the time of year but if it was going to happen it would be on a day like this.

Well we didn’t see any. In fact it was just a sunny winter’s day and not spring at all and in winter everything that isn’t dead is asleep.

So that’s that.

The End.

Okay now I am rubbing the word “Don’t” off the back of my hand with spit.

Why on earth did I think we would find butterflies on the last day of November?

There are five British butterflies that overwinter as adults and that means that throughout the whole winter these delicate little insects will be outside, even when the streams freeze up and stop moving and frost covers everything in long crystals.

On any warm winter day they can and do wake up and they have a little stretch and bask in the sun for an hour before going back to sleep. These five will be the first to welcome the spring.

I will show them to you.

Three pictures of the Brimstone because I don’t think that I have had it on the blog yet. Not very flashy wings but it has a lovely photogenic face.

The other beautiful animals are…

Comma

Red Admiral

Small Tortoiseshell

Peacock
All of these animals emerge in the summer sun and they are like teenagers, they don’t have any responsibilities. All that they do is drink nectar and enjoy the sun. Somehow when summer ends they have to survive the winter and when spring comes they will have to learn about territories and breeding. Well, that can be fun too.

It was a long shot but we could have seen any of these butterflies.

Anyway this isn’t going to be a post about any of these, this is a post about the Orange Tip and somewhere there is probably a reason.

This morning I wrote a couple of posts for my Easy Wildflowers Blog. They were both about Strawberries (of sorts) The Wild Strawberry….

And the Barren Strawberry.

Pretty easy to tell apart, the real strawberry has a yellow dome in the centre of the flower.

Whilst I was researching the species I came across this interesting bit of information, you can tell the species apart because on the leaf of the Barren Strawberry the tooth at the tip of the leaf is smaller than the teeth either side of it. (True)

Whereas on the Wild Strawberry it um…isn’t (particularly)

Did you know that?

I think that there are easier ways to separate the plants but it is all good.

The other good way to tell if it is a real Wild Strawberry is to wait and see if Bananas grow on it. Wild Strawberries are really small and Bananas are far away.

OOOh! That coffee is kicking in.

Anyway I digress. While I was checking out my pictures of Strawberries I happened to notice some other pictures of Orange Tips and the Orange Tip is a butterfly. Do you get the connection?

The Orange Tip was sitting on my hand. Over the last few days I have become involved with a bird that might sit on my hand and so the Orange Tip struck a chord.

Robins are pesky birds.

I made the mistake recently of not identifying this bird, it is a European Robin. In the UK this is probably the most recognised and most loved bird that we have. I have got a love of these animals.

They hang around my flat and try and steal my stuff. Over the last few days I have been trying to get one to feed from my hand and so that is why I decided to write a post about the Orange Tip.

Everybody loves the Robin Redbreast. It is an audacious little bird and approaches men and seems friendly.

Male Robins will not tolerate each other and they fight to the death. I have read that up to ten per cent of all Robin deaths may be down to robinicide, they are little psychopaths, they are killers but they are fine with other species.

So anyway, as I was saying, When I first arrived here I was quickly accepted because of my affinity with animals. I know what they like to eat.

Everybody was happy because I brought Robins with me (Meal worms). The old fellow even started stealing my photographs to put on his wall…..

Then the Goldfinches arrived (Sunflower hearts)

These birds are so sweet and charming and as they had never been here before I received a request to stop feeding the Robins in case they chased the Goldfinches away.

Like Goldfinches can’t look after themselves 🙂

The bird wears war paint.

I have been feeding the Robins by my back door and recently I have begun to think that I could get them feeding from my hand, which would be very nice.

So little animals in my hand was on my mind when I looked through my library for strawberry pictures and that is when I saw the Orange Tip.

Now, keeping in mind the need to be precise and avoid rambling, I just need to tell you about how little animals came to be in my hands in the first place.

Back in the olden days when I first started hanging out in woods the animals were very friendly.

Some of them were a bit too friendly and it seemed like they just couldn’t get enough of me.

 What you are looking at there is probably the second most dangerous animal in the world. Mosquitoes kill more people than all of the Tigers and Great Whites and Crocodiles and everything else that you can think of put together.

The only thing worse than a Mosquito is me and my kind.

Still I quite like them. I understand that it is only the females that take my blood and they only do it because they need the protein to make their eggs and Mosquitoes love their children as much as we love ours.

Horse Flies on the other hand are just mean.

You don’t even feel a Mozzie, they are masters of stealth but Horse Flies have mouth parts that slash and rip flesh and you get instant pain.

Ouch! That had to hurt.Shut up! Who asked you?

Being quite green (Naive rather than environmental) my solution was Deet.

It is very effective. It works by creating a smell that is really offensive to insects and for a couple of years I lived in an insect free world.

One day my bottle of Deet just stopped working. It had always worked and then it just stopped. Why would that happen?

On my first day without Deet I got this photograph.

That was the day that I realised that the best way to approach insects might not be to cover myself in insect repellent. I have never worn it since.

So to get to the subject of this post.

The Orange tip is a lovely spring butterfly.

It is very common in the spring time and easy to recognise, you can spot them a mile off.

The female of the species is a different matter. She doesn’t have the orange tips, she is just white and there are a few small white butterflies around at that time of year. I desperately wanted to photograph the female.

Every little white butterfly that I chased down the hedgerow turned out to be one of these.

This is a Green-veined White and not a female Orange Tip.

I was beginning to think that Orange Tips must mate with Green-veined Whites and there was no such thing as a female Orange Tip.

So anyway, one day I was out looking at the Wild Arum flower.

This is not really a flower at all, the flowers are inside. The Arum Lily is really a complex Fly trap.

It is a bit like the opposite of an insect repellent, it is designed to attract insects.

Now I am not suggesting that anybody goes out and covers themselves in Arum sap. It is a deadly poison that burns and blisters the skin but these things do happen and in the process of examining the fly trap I was exposed to the sap.

I did wash my hands in a nearby puddle of mud and I dried them on a convenient walking hand towel that I always keep with me for just such an emergency.

By this time my hands must have been smelling pretty good. (It’s okay I didn’t poison the dog)

This is a female Orange Tip.

Now I am afraid that I have forgotten what I was talking about. Monday evening has become Tuesday morning and the whiskey is all gone. I must get some sleep.

This month I have to work on my Easy Wildflowers blog and get some content on there. You might think that I am slacking a bit. It is only temporary and it will be worth it. That blog is going to be very good.

Take care.

How to take Photographs (2 – The Software)

A lot of what I do has nothing to do with camera settings. It has to do with the way that I approach photography and what I do with the pictures afterwards.

Okay. My software is very important to me and yet I don’t ever mess about with my pictures. I do two things, I throw them away and I crop them, sometimes I lighten or darken them but generally if it’s not what I need then I throw it away.

This is the software that I use. Picasa

Why Picasa? It is free and it does all that I need it to do and it is very easy to use. I find it a good way to organise all of the picture on my hard drive.

The first thing that I do is, I throw lots of pictures away.

Tip number one: Take lots of photographs. I know that professional photographers don’t have to do this but why not do it?

I grew up in an age when you had to buy a roll of film with twelve or twenty four exposures and when you had taken your pictures you had to send them off to the chemists and pay again to have them developed. We don’t have to do that any more. Photography is free.

I am quite happy to take a hundred photographs like this…

To get this one.

That’s cheating!

Yes it is. I told you that I was a cheat and that I would show you how I do it.

I want to photograph the animal because it is beautiful and I want to know it, I don’t care how I achieve that.

Close your mouth Fizz, we are not a fish.

I don’t want to give the impression that I go out and take ten photographs and come back with ten beautiful pictures. On a good summer’s day I have been known to come back with a thousand pictures and some of them have been very good.

I throw the other nine hundred and ninety away 🙂

This is where my software starts to come into it’s own. Picasa allows me to select as many pictures as I want and then right click and “Delete from disk.” A thousand gig hard drive isn’t as big as you might think.

Now I am sorry about this but I am trying to show my friend how to be a brilliant photographer, like as wot I am 🙂

The next bad thing that I do is that I crop photographs mercilessly.

Professional photographers can’t do this, they have to spend a lot of time framing their picture and getting it just right. Why? because if you want to sell your photograph then you want it to be as big as it can be and you don’t just want to cut a little bit out of the middle and sell that.

I do want to cut a bit out of the middle. I use Picasa to resize all of the pictures that I am going to post anyway. We have a storage limit on WordPress, mine is already half full. So I post my pictures at 1024 x whatever. There is no point in posting full size pictures to WP.

So this…

Becomes this.

Picasa handles these simple tasks very well.

Now my friend, I have told you enough. If you go out and take lots of pictures and apply these skilful techniques that I have divulged then tomorrow you will have a set of excellent photographs to post.

It is very simple. If we take enough pictures then some of them will be good. Neither of us is capable of messing them all up. I have been taking pictures on this basis for many years now.

However there is a bit more to it than that. You have chosen a very good camera (Panasonic FZ40) and on intelligent auto mode it will take some good pictures but there are some simple ways to make it do better.

It all has to do with light and speed and we have to mess with our aperture settings and stuff like that. It is very easy and I don’t change mine much. That can be another post, I must go and play ball with Poochy now or she will cry.

The main thing is that you have to want to take photographs. You have to love your subject and you have to be loved back.

The rest is easy 🙂

You Are My Sunshine

Can Colin come out to play?

Go away it’s raining.

Whine, whine whine emotional blackmail.

Throw shoe out of window.

Is that you final answer?

No.

I can’t do anything today. I can’t take photographs and I can’t bring happiness to the smallest heart.

She doesn’t have a heart, she is part of the me generation. Me Me Me! That makes her my sunshine.

Today I am going to take a retrospective look at what a lovely summer it was. Starting with Butterflies. Fizz and I had a good butterfly summer. Regular readers will have seen these pictures, I took them from my media library, new readers will never even have heard of Lord Tusk (Beloved of the Faeries) either way it is just a look back at a great summer and something to do while stupido dog splashes in puddles.

We had the best of summers.

It hasn’t been a bad summer, has it Fluffy?

Not so far.

Probosci

Well it is “Probosci and the small question of my fee”

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

You know that and today my Butterflies are finding out. It was hard work fetching them nettles every day and I got stung a lot so in return I want a few pictures.

I set up a little waiting place for them to sit as they summon up the courage to take off into the wild….and I started  taking pictures.

Then I noticed something rather odd about this Butterfly. It has probosci  rather than a probscis.

I know that this is coming from the fellow who brought you a Faerie just two days ago but these are genuine photographs of a Butterfly with two tongues.

I have never seen this before but then I have led a sheltered life.

I started this post this morning and I couldn’t finish it because I did not understand my own photographs, I posted my pictures to some experts and took a two headed dog for a walk. I live in a world of fantastic creatures.

I have had no response from the experts. I took some more pictures of my Butterfly’s tongue or rather tongues.

They seem to be fusing together and almost look like a normal tongue now.

So that is the mystery, now what about my fee?

I won’t go into a sermon but I am in awe of the beauty of these animals, they make me want to sing hymns. I didn’t create this, well, I carried it in my room (which rhymes with womb) for a month or so but really I just pointed my stick at it. Something else created this. All of my pictures are free.

PAY ME!

That will do nicely, I am cheap. Take care my little friend.

For the rest of the summer this little animal will drive me nuts every time I try to approach it but today it is mine. 🙂

There is something that I have got to add before I post this. The Butterfly with two tongues is not looking healthy. It is comfortable and sitting by the window but hasn’t made any attempt to leave and it has been there for about five hours now. I think that I am looking at some sort of genetic abnormality that may go deeper than just having two tongues. So it goes. We released a lot of animals today.

Consumed by Butterflies

Well my day has been eaten up by them.

I have only actually released about ten. There are as many again that seem to have bedded down for the night. It is only eight thirty here but it is getting quite dark, it is just the bad weather, it was dark at lunchtime.

I made many hours of video today but I will spare you that. Watching Butterflies wings dry is a bit like paint.

I just want to post a few more pictures of these beautiful animals. It is not often that I can get this close to them or see them in such good condition.

Butterfly Day

As I start this post it is coming up to midday here in the UK and it has been raining steadily for the last eight hours.

I have been dreading this scenario. There will soon be thirty two butterflies flapping around in my kitchen with nowhere to go.

Can you imagine the cacophony that thirty two pairs of wings will create. My landlord will be banging on my ceiling, “What’s going on up there?”

It says in my lease, “No pets and no more than thirty animals in the kitchen at any one time.” That is why I borrow the Dog from downstairs.

Fizz is not allowed in my flat, she is not even allowed in her own house. It is sort of a farming thing that animals sleep outside. I could get into a lot of trouble today so I hope that the sun comes out this afternoon.

I thought that you might like to see Butterflies emerging from their chrysalis. I have speeded this video up to twice normal speed to make it a bit easier to watch. I tried 4x but the movements became jerky and unnatural and I didn’t like it.

There are eight Butterflies drying their wings out in my kitchen cupboard at the moment.

The ones that emerged yesterday spent the night in there and I released them this morning at around ten o’clock when we had a brief break in the rain.

That is the perfect form. Absolutely beautiful.

There will be a lot more Butterfly photographs to follow.

 

Peacock Butterflies (1)

I am going to be a bit tied up for the next day or two. No I haven’t got a new girlfriend, my Butterflies are starting to emerge.

Yesterday I looked at the chrysalis’s  and they looked like this.

Today they had changed.

The first one is out. Don’t worry about the picture quality just now, I will sort that out. They are on paper and I can move them into better light. For now this one is right at the back of a cupboard on an overcast day so it is a bit poor quality.

There are thirty two chrysalis. I knew that when one started to go that would be the signal that the rest would follow, they all moulted at the same time. I have just been back to check on the first one and as I looked in a second emerged right in front of me. It is a great thing to see. I will video it for you.

A whole bunch of them stuck themselves to the nettles, they are easy to move around

As the nettles died the leaves started to fall off. This is the only chrysalis that has come off. When I was cleaning out around them I took this one out and put it on my kitchen table. It started leaping around like a Mexican Jumping Bean. I never knew they were concious and capable of movement in this state.

Well this is a badly written and badly photographed post but bear with me, things are going to get a lot clearer and you will see some beautiful things.

Now I have to take Shaun the Sheep for a little walk. The day is getting on, I hope they don’t all emerge in the night.

Being Slightly Imperfect

Today I am going to talk about a subject that  I know a little bit about.

We can’t all be perfect.

Actually, you can shut up! I am talking about Butterflies.

At least the Dog is enjoying herself.

A few years ago I found this Dragonfly.

It is a female Black-tailed Skimmer and one of it’s wings is badly misshapen, at the time I didn’t know why but I found out.

Yesterday I found this beautiful Butterfly in a similar situation.

What has happened is that her wing has failed to inflate properly.

When a Butterfly emerges from it’s chrysalis it’s wings are crumpled and folded against it’s body. It has to find a place to hang and it pumps fluid through the wings to inflate them and once inflated  the excess fluid is drained off and the Butterfly has to wait for it’s wings to dry. The whole process can take several hours.

This time something has gone wrong and one of her wings has failed to inflate properly.

This Butterfly could still fly though and it didn’t seem too troubled by it’s slight imperfection.

Here is the perfect state, the imago.

Okay, I have just got to take the Dog for a walk…. 🙂

Chrysalis

My caterpillars have been entertaining me today.

They were very well behaved when the time came to pupate. For the last week they have been escaping and running all around my kitchen and causing me no end of problems. I was dreading the time when they decided to leave the host plant and pupate but they were all very good and stayed in their cupboard. They made life very easy for me.

This video runs for six minutes because that is how long it takes the caterpillar to shed it’s skin and then attach itself to the roof of the cupboard. I don’t expect people to watch a six minute video, just watch what you like but it is important that we have it.

I will just tell you what you are going to see. The caterpillar has attached a ball of silk to the roof and he is hanging from his two back prolegs. His skin will split and inside there is a chrysalis. There is a moment when the old skin has almost been shed when the caterpillar is quite vulnerable. It is the old skin that is attached to the silk and not the chrysalis, if it sheds too quickly the chrysalis will fall. At this stage it is a very soft bag filled with fluid, if it falls it will probably burst open and die. At the end of the chrysalis there is a hook like structure called a cremaster and before it falls the chrysalis must twist this cremaster into the silk pad and then the old skin can be dropped. That is what all the wriggling about is for toward the end of the video.

That is magic.

Here is one that I made earlier.

Next we have to photograph the changes in the chrysalis as it ages and then film butterflies emerging from their chrysalis’s.

That shouldn’t be too difficult, as soon as one emerges I will know that the others are about to do the same. I hope 🙂

Animal Magic

“Just like that”

It’s your destiny

The Swallows have fledged, or at least they are fledging. They are still in the nest today but they have been out and they can fly.

It has taken me a few days watching and all that you get are a couple of short video’s but for me, my understanding and the pleasure that I got from watching them makes a few days just a drop in the ocean. It was time well spent.

Anyway you should be glad that you don’t have to watch the whole twenty hours of video, that I now have to sort and delete from my machine to free up space.

Here are the best bits.

Yesterday morning there were five birds on the nest, there were five birds on the nest and then there were four birds on the nest. I had missed the very first flight and only realised when number five returned to the nest.

This first video starts with the mother calling for them to leave the nest, there is a little comic interlude of the way that they follow flies, their little heads bobbing in unison and in the last bit the second bird to approach the nest is the returning chick. Does he bring food back or do the others just think that he has?

This next video shows them leaving the nest and returning. They spent most of the day fluttering around inside the little alley way that has become their home and by the end of the day they were all settled back on the nest but this is fledging. Today I think that they have ventured outside and seen the blue sky but they still return to the nest.

These birds have made me think a lot about nature as a whole thing and about life and death in the wild. The caterpillars that I am trying to raise are falling to the parasitoid flies that these Swallows depend on for food and survival. The parents have done a really good job of raising them given the wet weather we have been having. I have often looked out in the pouring rain and wondered how they are managing to raise a brood and now this, flight.

I am so in in love and in awe of them and so damned jealous.

I am jealous because they get to eat those delicious crunchy flies, or perhaps because they can raise offspring in a matter of weeks and not the 26 years it usually takes us. Maybe I am jealous of something else altogether…..