- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Look, over there!
It's Thanksgiving Week and there's a newly eclosed Gulf Fritillary on a tattered pink zinnia "that looks as it has seen better days," as my mother used to say.
The orange of autumn exploding, the silver of yultide beckoning. Silver and bold...
And here's an orange butterfly nectaring on a pink zinnia...
We usually see all life stages of the Gulf Frits, aka "passion butterflies," on their host plant, the passionflower vine (Passiflora) from early summer to late fall in our Vacaville garden.
This one is the last of the season, the last of its generation, the last to show its colors.
Buddy, it's too late to find a mate, and quite late to come to the table for a little nectar.
On this Thanksgiving Day, as we give thanks for the gifts of life, life brings us more gifts.
Happy Thanksgiving!
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
No matter how many we see or how often we see them, we can't get enough of the Gulf Frits.
That would be the Gulf Fritillary (Agraulis vanillae), a brightly colored orangish-reddish butterfly with silver-spangled underwings. It's also known as the passion butterfly because its host plant is the passionflower vine (Passiflora).
Depending on what you see first--the brilliant orange or the gleaming silver--the Gulf Frit appears to be two butterflies. Two dazzling butterflies.
Butterfly guru Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at te University of California, Davis, calls it a "dazzling bit of the New World Tropics...introduced into southern California in the 19th Century --we don't know how-- and (it) was first recorded in the Bay Area before 1908, though it seems to have become established there only in the 1950s."
We've observed the Gulf Frit almost year around in Yolo and Solano counties. Once we saw it laying an egg on Christmas Day in Vacaville (Solano County). What a gift!
As the year slips to a close, and spring beckons, we anxiously await the welcoming sight of a fluttering butterfly touching down on a gently swaying blossom. Like a Gulf Frit on a long-stemmed Mexican sunflower (Tithonia).
The butterfly is a flying flower,
The flower a tethered butterfly.
~Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun
