Black Swallowtail Cats Going To School!

We had an exciting day to say the least on the Durham Butterfly Count. My party of three ladies and myself found well over 1000 butterflies and 45 species in all! We had a total of 396 Eastern Tiger Swallowtails, not a record for the count but likely as many as the other 4 parties found combined.  Also we had 53 Silvery Checkerspots and Will by himself found 50 as well blowing away the normal 12-15 found on the previous counts. Usually 1 Zebra Swallowtail is a lucky find on this count, we had 16 of them and Will had 4, so 20 in all!

The bad news is Meg and I both found maybe 500 seed ticks on our pants. I have never seen seed ticks in these kind of numbers around here. The places I have been where seed ticks are found someone usually brings tape to get them off our clothes. We dowsed them in bug spray to get rid of them and then took a very strong shower after the count.

OK now to the title posting about Black Swallowtails. Meg now teaches second grade and as many of you might know second grade usually teaches about life cycles. Tonight we gleaned around 20 of the 38 Black Swallowtail caterpillars in our garden to take to class tomorrow! Our Bronze Fennel finally brought in some Black Swallowtails, we only saw 2 today on the count.

These 4 Black Swallowtail caterpillars we all lined up on the fennel this evening, ready for school! We left these in the garden as they were eating a fennel in a place we don't want fennel. Fennel is very invasive be careful if you do plant it as it grows very well in the gravel driveway where it is hard to dig up. I usually toss out 2 out of 3 plants in the garden every spring.

male Black Swallowtail on verbena, from years past in our garden.

female Black Swallowtail on thistle.
Learn more about Black Swallowtails on my main web page at this link. Note when you get to the Black Swallowtail page you will find a second page link on the bottom left and links to similar swallowtails as well as all my pages do.

One other thing I wanted to mention about raising butterflies in the classroom. There are a lot of butterfly farms that sell kits of Painted Ladies and Monarchs from places far away for schools to raise. A lot of butterfly watchers do not approve of bringing in distant populations of butterflies and mixing them into local populations. At least we know these Black Swallowtails were of a local population and once mature releasing them back into the wild will not harm or alter the local population. Good thing Meg has me the butterfly guy as a partner isn't it?