Backyard Wildlife

This species of brown butterfly was a regular visitor to our butterfly plant just out the window from our breakfast table. It is called a Silver-spotted Skipper. And it is a fat one! August 11

This phenomenon we call the "finch mob". It is not unusual to have more than a dozen finches in the back yard. But at times they disappear for a week or more. August 11.

On August 12, just the day after the major event with the redheaded woodpecker and its youngster, we got good views of the red-bellied sapsucker. We have seen this species regularly over the past few years, and had wondered whether it had run off the redheads that we used to have around here. But now we have seen both in a short time period.

The hummingbirds like the red pentas, so we watch them from our breakfast table. From what I can get from the web and books, this is a female rubythroat hummingbird. With no ruby throat, it took me a while to become aware of that. This one visited on August 24 at about 10:30am.

These visits were between Aug 12 and Aug 24.

The typical encounter with the female rubythroat was that she would come to sample the red pentas below the feeder, and then cautiously ascend to the feeder. Many times she would be dive-bombed by the alpha hummingbird.

The emerald green back of this lady led me to just call her "Greenie" before I pinned down the fact that she is a female rubythroat.

August 13. The yellow swallowtail was our most common butterfly this summer. I included the view at right to show his yellow body to make the case that he is probably the Tiger Swallowtail subspecies that is officially the Georgia State Butterfly.

One of the stranger creatures of the garden is the hummingbird hawk moth. This one visited our butterfly bush on August 25 and made several short appearances over the summer. He looks like a bee, but he is definitely not. He hovers like a hummingbird to drink nectar with his long proboscis, and he has a tail shaped similarly to that of a hummingbird.

Notice that the wings are transparent! That's not like any other moth I know about! It's like those remarkable transparent-winged butterflies we saw in Costa Rica.