It was a butterfly day! We got to see migrating monarchs for the first time since we moved down here to North Carolina! And some of their fellow pollinators. Interesting to note that North Carolina is home to 75 butterfly, more than 500 bee, and over 4,000 moth species.
Yesterday is History,
’Tis so far away —
Yesterday is Poetry — ’tis Philosophy —
Yesterday is mystery —
Where it is Today
While we shrewdly speculate
Flutter both away
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #1290)
Cheers to seeing the monarchs for the first time in NC. Great catches of multiple simultaneous pollinators. Hope all is well with you.
Thank you, Frank. It was a pretty exciting morning. We’re as well as can be expected. I hope you enjoyed your blogging break.
Love the pictures! Hope you enjoy a beautiful NC autumn.
Thank you, Anna! We’re enjoying the cooler temperatures and some color here and there.
Wow, did I ever enjoy these butterfly photos, Barbara. My favorite is the coneflower with two monarchs showing the upper and lower wing displays. Lovely to be in the garden with you, also enjoyed the fountain grass, ducks and other beauties. Wonderful Emily Dickinson contribution, too.
Thank you, Jet, I’m so glad you enjoyed the butterflies and flowers. Emily is so succinct, time flutters away like the butterflies do, only to be enjoyed ever so briefly. It was a fun morning capturing these lovely creatures to enjoy them again in memory.
Beautiful and adorable
Thank you, Leelah. I hope you are doing well. 💕
Ah, those Monarchs are splendid — glad you got a chance to see them, Barbara! I’ve never heard of a shelduck before. He kind of looks like he stuck his head in bleach! Isn’t it wonderful how generous flowers are with pollinators?!
Flowers and pollinators do have a mutually beneficial relationship, don’t they? They’d be lost without each other. I posted pictures of the ruddy shelduck swimming last month. He’s not native to North America and must have been imported.
Oh, yeah, now I remember. Thanks, Barbara!
🙂
Great captures, Barbara, so glad you were able to get out to enjoy the cooler weather once again.
Thank you, Eliza. We are definitely enjoying the cooler temperatures — Tim even put on long pants yesterday!
My favorite “complementary wing views“! Lovely day!! We will see them soon…
Thank you, Teri! We used to see them earlier than this in Connecticut — amazing how far they travel, giving so many of us a chance to see them. It was definitely a lovely day!
All month I have been watching the Giant Sulfur Butterfly migration North straight up my street in a single file line. I just saw another one! I don’t know where they are going. But they are all headed the exact same direction! Very pretty yellow butterfly.
Wow! I had to look up Giant Sulphur butterflies — what a delicate pale shade of yellow! You were so lucky to see them fluttering by. 🙂
What a gorgeous Monarch at the beginning Barbara and I chuckled at “three’s a crowd”. Then the “complementary wing views” came along and it was a “two-fer” – very pretty to see two together. I’ve never had two Monarchs on one flower before. You saw so many butterflies – I’ve still not seen a Skipper Butterfly. That Mallard posed perfectly on the rocks for you. I have never seen a Ruddy Shelduck, so I Googled if they are found in Michigan and there were some reported in Monroe this year, so hopefully they were not just passing through.
I once saw a group of Monarchs passing through Council Point Park – not a gigantic migration, but all of a sudden they just fluttered on by, alighted on a big evergreen, (I guess to catch their breath), then left, a stream of orange and black. I was so stunned to see this I only got one shot, with just a few Monarchs, nothing special at all. I didn’t know your state had so many pollinator species. The Monarch backed off a little from the bee, tilting to one side in the one photo.
I couldn’t believe how many bees and butterflies there were on those purple coneflowers. They wouldn’t hold still, though, so getting decent pictures was a big challenge, mostly hit or miss. It was remarkable how many were landing on each flower. I never noticed skippers before moving down here, and there are so many kinds of them. The ruddy shelducks are from Asia so they are not native to North America. It may be some have escaped captivity and had a brood in the wild. It normally migrates from India to southeastern Europe and central Asia.
That sounds like an amazing sight, so many monarchs together. It reminds me of a scene Barbara Kingsolver described in her excellent novel Flight Behavior.
That amazed me too – maybe all fueling up at once, especially the butterflies as they head south. I wish I had realized what was happening with all the butterflies and taken more photos, but I sure was mesmerized by them. I did a post and used the one photo I took and mentioned them and a fellow blogger from Pennsylvania said she and her husband were on a morning run and stopped and watched them go by. No wonder I’ve not seen a ruddy shelduck. We have different types of ducks here in Michigan, but I only see the most common ones here in SE Michigan.
I agree, watching monarchs is mesmerizing. Tim got a picture of one on Block Island way back in 2012. It inspired me to write a haiku!
https://www.ingebrita.net/2012/10/bright-wings-of-autumn/
I wasn’t lucky enough to get my own monarch picture until 2017!
Thank you for the link Barbara. That’s a beautiful Monarch butterfly – kudos to Tim and your Haiku is beautiful. I have never written a Haiku before. You both are talented. P.S. – WordPress has fixed the issue of not being able to comment on blogger’s actual sites as I had no problem doing so.
Thank you for your kind words, Linda, and for leaving such a nice comment on that old post. I’m glad WordPress fixed whatever bug was preventing the leaving of comments on older posts. Hope the fix lasts! Maybe you can try writing a haiku about one of your nature moments from one of your walks someday.
I am glad if WordPress has fixed their little issues, though I still have issues with the “like” button so I now never “like” until I’ve sent the comment, so I know if the comment doesn’t work properly it doesn’t look like I just “liked” and nothing more … honestly, I thought that was because I was using the older laptop/Windows 7. I would like to try sometime … I need to expand my horizons. I have managed to read two books this month which is good for me, but because I wasn’t driving all over the place getting errands done/groceries in due to the contractor’s schedule of “supposed to be here/not here”, I got home earlier from the Park and next door was on vacation all week, so home with her howling dog, so no noise – blessed peacefulness.
Great pictures Barbara — I’ve never seen more than one butterfly on a flower. Bravo that you were so quick you could capture such beauties with your camera.
Thank you, Rosie! I have to admit I just kept snapping pictures one after another, hoping a few would come out. They were moving too fast to plan any captures!
Yesterday is philosophy. Emily had it right with that idea. Your photos are exquisite, the detail on the butterflies is amazing.
Thank you, Ally. It was a fun photo op. What yesterday seems to be does depend on what angle you’re looking at it from. 😉
Lovely series of the three nature B’s! Birds, bees and butterflies!! 🙂
Thank you, Donna! Hats off to the star pollinators — the 3 Beautiful Bs! 🙂