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

Free Manure and Hellebores!

Friday Meg and I went and picked up a 10' trailer full of horse manure. The manure was free , we were given the phone number of a horse farm not a mile from the house by the owner of Treefrog Nursery up the road. Because of the rain we have been having and my bald van tires the van got stuck twice behind this farm. Luckily they pulled us out with the tractor and loaded the trailer with 4 scoops of manure for us! Good neighbors no question!



Here is one of the two Camellias we purchased at Treefrog Nursery. The other is a double with huge red blossoms. This plant is around 3 foot tall. We still need to get about 5-6 more camellias.


Meg's sister brought her parents over today and she gave us these two huge hellebores from her garden in Chapel Hill. One plant had 18 blooms the other 20, seeds galore too.


These hellebores were in 3 gallon containers, I'm impressed such a nice gift.

While planting 2 camelias and 2 hellebores, I dug up the pignut hickory seed sprouting. I potted it, we'll see if I can grow one myself.

The morning included a hike with the Duke Natural History Group at Occoneechee State Preserve. I found this Brown Elfin on Spring Beauty. I'd never seen Brown Elfins near the Eno River at the park always found them along the Brown Elfin Knob Trail. Meg found 5 other Brown Elfins, in all we had 7 a pretty good number.

All that white among the grass is Spring Beauties, so beautiful don't you think?

And the prize of our morning Oconee Bells, Shortia galacifolia a new plant for me. Likely planted in this location as it is about 500 miles out of its range. We climbed a water fall to get to see and photograph them, not an easy task with my camera in tow.

For those of you that are bird watchers we also had our first of spring birds. Heard calling an Ovenbird then along the Eno River we heard then saw a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher.