Any Strange and Wonderful Visitors? Photos please!

My daughter gets photo credits for this on her incredibly good picture taking iPhone!  Tiger Swallowtail enjoying some nectar from the Buddleia!



Gorgeous.

WOW! Great shot!  Those snooty things never pose for me like that.

Nice Gulf Fritillary, Suz!
And a lovely Tiger Swallowtail, SR!
I have a Black Swallowtail visiting - residing, really.  Mine's just a baby-- much easier to photograph. It's on the bolted parsley, which the pollinators (wasps, wannabees -- not honey or bumblebees) are delighted by. The flowers seem so small...but I guess they're tasty! I was going to remove it once the flowers were done, but the plant gets to stick around as long as this little gal/guy needs. Probably only a week or two. They grow up so fast! (Do parsley seeds have any culinary uses?)


I found another baby on my Queen Anne's Lace, right after thinking "I should have thinned those seedlings a bit more, that's a lot of Queen Anne's Lace to deadhead."

My other visitor was a dragonfly that got lost in the fold at the top of my fence. One of the big ones with white and black clouds on the wings. I let it loose rather than leaving it trapped longer so I could fetch the camera.

Nice photos! So wonderful to have garden visitors...

I have a strange and a pretty, and I don't know what either of them are. BTW, SR- I have not seen a Swallow Tail in such perfect condition in many years- great shot. Beetles, you must have a wonderful camera, that too is a perfect pic.

I have no clue what this is, but I don't like the looks of it.


This little one was very shy and jittery, I thought I would never get close enough to it, I think it got tired.

This little guy or gal showed up 6 feet high on my deck handrail.  I normally see brown toads from the pond next door running around the garden On The Ground.  So this little green guy or gal was a real surprise.  Doesn't it look mad Lol

bigdogrock wrote:I have a strange and a pretty, and I don't know what either of them are. BTW, SR- I have not seen a Swallow Tail in such perfect condition in many years- great shot. Beetles, you must have a wonderful camera, that too is a perfect pic.

I have no clue what this is, but I don't like the looks of it.


This little one was very shy and jittery, I thought I would never get close enough to it, I think it got tired.

I have a mid-range, non-DSLR camera that I got used, and I have a Raynox snap-on macro lens for it <-- typically only ~$65, MUCH less than getting a macro screw-on. My camera isn't the kind that uses screw-on lenses. My real secret is experience. Both at bug-whispering, and various techniques to reduce camera shake. I didn't take classes, so my methods are ... I don't know; the "real camera people" I've talked to are somewhere between baffled and aghast. As near as I can tell from what people say, I'm also able to being hold abnormally still. I blame a slow heart beat (not the because I'm really fit kind, unfortunately) for part of that.

Insect #1 is a robber fly - typically these are good guys, they eat other bugs.
Probably in the "hanging thieves" group of robberflies, and maybe a New York Bee Killer:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/224025/bgimage
(though I think they more often take wasps rather than bees)

And Insect #2 is a crescent butterfly. Probably Northern Crescent or Pearl Crescent -- but the two are very hard to tell apart, and there's even a possibility that they hybridize IIRC.

Llama mama, awesome tree froggy! Love those. He looks grumpy to me - like he's trying to take a nap and muttering darkly about paparazzi as you take his photo.

I adore frogs and toads....part of my OCD thing with the pool. Must.  Save.  Frogs and toads.  

Great pics and info on our garden pals, or enemies, or frenemies.....

Thanks, Rock.  He was a beaut, and a bit vain, I think!  Deservedly so!

Scorpio Rising wrote:I adore frogs and toads....part of my OCD thing with the pool. Must.  Save.  Frogs and toads.  

Me too! 

Here's the latest hopper to visit our cucurbit patch:





And, this video clip showed up in my FB newsfeed, too fascinating not to share:

 https://www.facebook.com/Love4Wildlife/videos/162416074182668/

Good or bad, I'd love to find one of these in my garden.  (Of course, with my luck, it would end up in my salad bowl and scare me half to death. )

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I think I am going to take a closer look when I harvest lettuce in the future.

Hey Beetles, what a beautifully interesting leaf looking creature. I have never seen one before. Thanks for sharing that!

Leafy relative of the Walking Stick?

bigdogrock wrote:Hey Beetles, what a beautifully interesting leaf looking creature. I have never seen one before. Thanks for sharing that!

Scorpio Rising wrote:Leafy relative of the Walking Stick?

This guy? It is the caterpillar of a black swallowtail butterfly. The one below is munching on Queen Anne's Lace. The one on my previous post was on my parsley. I believe the caterpillars eat dill, fennel, and carrot leaves, too.


I need to get another laptop... this one is old and full of bug... photos. I'll have to roll everything over to something with a bigger hard drive because I can't upload my latest batch of photos until I do. 

I was referring to Ginger's Facebook link to a lefty creature!  Lol!

Scorpio Rising wrote:I was referring to Ginger's Facebook link to a lefty creature!  Lol!

Oh, I see now! I thought I was confused, and I was right. 
Ok - from what I could tell before the link crashed my browser* -- that's a leaf insect, and, yes, the closest familiar relatives in North America are the walking sticks, though the two groups are fairly distant (different families within the same order - for now, maybe, depending on who you ask.)

*Not Ginger's fault, probably not Facebook's fault: Beetles just really needs to switch to a better laptop.

BeetlesPerSqFt wrote:

Scorpio Rising wrote:I was referring to Ginger's Facebook link to a lefty creature!  Lol!

Oh, I see now! I thought I was confused, and I was right. 
Ok - from what I could tell before the link crashed my browser* -- that's a leaf insect, and, yes, the closest familiar relatives in North America are the walking sticks, though the two groups are fairly distant (different families within the same order - for now, maybe, depending on who you ask.)

*Not Ginger's fault, probably not Facebook's fault: Beetles just really needs to switch to a better laptop.

Ok! I'm now flailing around on a newer laptop (Ack, different OS! Ack, muscle memory doesn't match new keyboard! Ack, much lighter weight, must be careful not to accidentally throw laptop!), and have my photo software up and running again!

Saw this tiny (fruit fly sized) but striking creature on a tomato leaf. My ID guess is Chloropisca glabra. The bugguide.net page for this insect says ""The larvae of Chloropisca glabra are peculiar among Chloropids in being predaceous on root aphids." -- Sabrosky, 1935"

Hrm. Not happy to hear I probably have root aphids in the garden, but glad the environment is doing something about it. I wonder if root aphids could be why one of my tomatoes is always stressed out?

That little predator is cute!  I wish I would have taken a picture of the feeding frenzy of wasps and ladybugs on the aphids on my milkweeds this week, it was almost terrifying there were so many types and numbers of wasps!  

I will get a pic, because it is unreal....

}" />I wouldn't say strange and wonderful but this is what I found in my garden.

Nice photo of a tomato horn worm, on a pepper plant!

I think hornworms are adorable. For some reason they make me think of puppies. It might be their little faces. I think if the one and only horn worm I found on my tomato plant wasn't covered with wasp eggs I would not have been able to do away with it. I don't know what I would have done. They are so cute!

Suppose I wouldn't be saying that if I'd come out to total devastation.

CC

CapeCoddess wrote:I think hornworms are adorable. For some reason they make me think of puppies. It might be their little faces. I think if the one and only horn worm I found on my tomato plant wasn't covered with wasp eggs I would not have been able to do away with it. I don't know what I would have done. They are so cute!

Suppose I wouldn't be saying that if I'd come out to total devastation.

CC

I think big caterpillars are cute, too. At least one hornworm would get to stay. But probably not all of them.  I'd likely try to find wild nightshade plants to rehome some of them to.

got our first monarch caterpillar on Satruday...I found it in the SFG then transferred it to a nearby marsh milkweed...found it again today and it had doubled in size within 24 hours...feeding on milkweed leaves like crazy.

landarch wrote:got our first monarch caterpillar on Satruday...I found it in the SFG then transferred it to a nearby marsh milkweed...found it again today and it had doubled in size within 24 hours...feeding on milkweed leaves like crazy.

 I have about 20 of them munching away in the butterfly house. I still have one more patch of milkweed to search, so that number may be rising. (I've already ordered more milkweed.)

Found a couple of these characters on a parsley plant. This was a couple of weeks ago before we went on a vacation trip. I believe they are the caterpillar of the black swallowtail butterfly.

These guys aren't strange or wonderful, but they visit every night. Actually, they sleep in the shed right behind them. They think they're pets and come toward us if we're outside at the wrong time. As you can tell by the fuzziness of the pic, I took this shot from a long way off.