Butterflies and sunflowers.....

We drove over to Henderson, KY yesterday to the "butterfly road". This is one of my favorite places to find butterflies. It is a stretch of gravel road about 2 miles long that is forested on both sides. That makes it rather shady, but the butterflies are always flying around in the gravel there. I was hoping to see the Zebra Swallowtail....and there were several flitting up and down the road. Mike drops me off when we spot a butterfly and I start walking with him following along in the car as I progress :-) What an accomodating "driver" I have!

I think the Zebra's are so pretty and they have such long tails! I was glad that this one wanted to pose for a few minutes! Most of the time they flit by and I can't begin to chase them down.

The road is always full of little American Snout butterflies, but they are hard to get good photos of. I don't think I will ever get a better photo than the one at the top of my side bar! Most of the time they look like this....dark and very uninteresting except for the snout!

This one is showing just a touch of the colorful wing. There must be a lot of Hackberry trees in this wooded area. Both the Snouts and the Hackberry Emperor use the Hackberry as their larval tree and I see both of these butterflies here in fairly large numbers.

The Hackberry Emperor....one of the most accomodating butterflies to take photos of! They are also "friendly".....I often have them land on me while trying to take photos. Mike took a photo last year of several of them perched on me.

They sit with their wings spread open a lot making photos easy.

In fact I couldn't get a good photo of them wings closed yesterday :-) The backside of their wings are rather pretty......lots of pattern.

I spotted one Question Mark....it didn't pose very well. Shooting down at gravel isn't the best way to shoot butterflies, but they sure like to sit there.

Here you can see the mark that gives it its name. It is a type of Comma butterfly, but that extra dot after the comma mark makes it a Question Mark.

When the wings are open there is an extra mark that makes it different from the Eastern Comma. I seem to see only the Question Marks around here. They like Hackberry trees, too according to my butterfly book!

One rather poor photo of an Admiral. In total I saw 5 kinds and I think I saw some Tiger Swallowtails fly by, but they didn't stop. I also saw plenty of dragonflies and the Ebony Jewelwing damselflies are also along the creek under a bridge there, but I didn't get any photos worth posting.

We drove from here to the riverbottoms area to look for birds and I will post some tomorow. On the road as we left we saw this field of sunflowers.

A very old barn.....bet it's full of swallows!.....behind the sunflowers.

The sunflowers were all facing away from the road, but we pulled into a little parking area for some photos.
Lots of sunny heads.

I like the orderly rows.

Trying to get them facing the other way....unfortunately my car was sitting at the end!

Not quite ripe......maybe next time we see them there will be birds plucking seeds out, unless they harvest them.

Riper!

Chasing butterflies....

Last Thursday I drove down the road to Hartman Arboretum to see if there were any butterflies. I found plenty, but spent more time "chasing" them then getting good photos! The part of the garden that the butterlies like the best is nicely grown up, so there was a lot to attract them.
My best shot of the day.....FINALLY an open blue butterfly! Normally these tiny little things sit there closed up tight and I get a lot of edge shots and some side shots. They sure love the clover and I stirred them up everywhere I walked in the grass. I think it is the Eastern Tailed Blue, which is the only kind I seem to see.

There were 3 Tiger Swallowtails around the Bottle Bush, but I had trouble getting them to pose for me. I went around and around that bush trying to keep up with them!

The best shot I got.

I seem to get a lot of shots of them hanging like this and can't get into position as the wind blows them around.

One black Tiger Swallowtail.

Lots of the little Silver Spotted Skippers....with their "white elephant" mark.

A Painted Lady not quite all the way open.

Here is her side view.

Lots of bees enjoying themselves.

I scared this young Red-Wing Blackbird out of one clump of milkweed and grass.

I'll try to go back this Thursday and maybe it won't be so windy. This is always a great place for a variety of butterflies, but they are only open to the public on Thursdays.

Are you my mother?......

I've heard about Cowbirds laying their eggs in other bird's nests, but had never observed the results before.....until yesterday! Cowbird "baby" and Chipping Sparrow!
"Are you my mother?"
"I'm hungry!"

Kind of cute when not begging

"Feed me!!!!!"

"Ah, shucks.....I'm just a big baby"

"Oh, good, Mom.......more!"
I thought the mother Chipping Sparrow looked a little leery everytime it gave the big baby some food.

"I'll wait here.....come back with more food soon!"

Fountain visitors....

The latest crop of baby House Sparrows discovered the "froggy fountain" yesterday. I'm sorry about the bad light on some of these. The fountain is in the shade and I was shooting these through the glass windows by the front door.5 of the little sparrows checking it out
Getting a drink at the top where the water sort of collects at the frog leg.

OK....go right to the source.

The wind was blowing the water around, so it was funny to watch them "chase" the water.

"Maybe if we all surround this magic water thing we can control it."

Getting wet at the base.....not much room to play in the water. My flat clay dish that the sparrows like to play in broke and I need to get a new one.

A House Finch stopped to join the sparrows.

And a Titmouse

I think this is a young Titmouse. There wasn't any black patch above the beak and it's crest is pretty small :-)

The Chipping Sparrow tries the fountain next.

A busy day!

There seem to be a lot of young birds right now....the baby House Sparrows, a baby Chipping Sparrow was in the driveway this morning, the young Titmouse, and I saw a young Cardinal but didn't get a photo.

SkyWatch Friday from Oaklyn Library's meadow

It's SkyWatch Friday! We've had blue skies with lots of puffy clouds all week! This shot of the sky was at a public park. (Formerly a landfill and this area is off-limits to people, but the meadowlarks like it)

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The rest of my post is of the flower meadow at Oaklyn Library. This branch of our public library is underground with a lovely wildflower meadow on top that you can walk around.

A view of the sky as I walk up the hill to get on top of the library.

What looks like a "building" is actually a skylight looking down into the library below. They have mown paths among the flowers and I walked around for an hour or more looking for butterflies and enjoying the flowers.

An over-view of part of the meadow.

Masses of flowers that were full of bees.
Below are shots of various critters and flowers I saw.

Widow Skimmer male

Sulphur

A couple of bugs here, but don't know what kind

Black Tiger Swallowtail, I think. It was very windy and this butterfly stayed deep in the flowers.

One of the many bees that loved this flowers!
Some grasses along one edge of the meadow.

A last view of the sky!
That's my SkyWatch for this week. For more skies from around the world click on the icon on my sidebar.