Harvester Day!

Today my friend Roger and I went to explore Piney Mountian Creek in a Duke Forest tract that I'd never been in before. Right away before we even got started walking I noticed several large American Beech trees and said this would be a great place to find a Harvester butterfly! We had left Roger's car downstream along side the road so we could just bushwack our way downstream perhaps 3 miles to his car.

The woods were beautiful with beech trees everywhere in a mixed hardwood forest. At one of the first sand bars I found an Harvester with my binocs. We took photos only to find another. Soon we had found 8 male Harvesters in the wet sand at sand bars. Later on we found a grove of mature beech trees and spied an harvester, then another, we ended up with 5 at this spot. Soon we had found in total 19 Harvesters which is a North Carolina second high count for this species! 25 is the high count record in Granville County back in 2006.

Typical male Harvester on a sandbar. Male imbibe minerals to aid in the reproductive cycle.

Harvester do sometimes perch upside down like this one.

Harvesters are the only butterfly in the US that is carnivorous as the caterpillar feeds on Woolly Aphids and not plant matter like the other butterflies.

The best way to find them is to look in beech forest along streams and rivers. All except one harvester today perched on the twigs of American Beech as you can see in the above two photos. They tend to chase each other around at eye level or higher and will perch sooner or later if you watch them long enough, usually a minute or two.

male Eastern Tiger Swallowtail perched on a sandbar