Photo of the Week: An Unexpected Fall Visitor

Large Italian flat parsley plant in a pot with a black caterpillar with lengthwise rows of yellow markings with a white spot in the middle of its body foraging on one of the green leaves.

As I was doing my fall cleanup in the garden, I was surprised to find an unexpected fall visitor: an early stage Black swallowtail caterpillar munching on an Italian flat parsley leaf.

I knew parsley, along with dill, are host plants for Black swallowtail butterflies. But I hadn’t seen any swallowtail caterpillars on my dill or parsley plants all year.

Until this week.

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Photo of the Week: Black Swallowtail Butterfly

black butterfly with blue and yellow accents rests on a clump of fallen Phragmites stalks

After three hours of successful searching for migrating shorebirds along a marsh near Lake Erie, our group of birdwatchers slowly made their way back to our vehicles. Ahead of me, several people stopped to gaze toward the ground. They didn’t take out their binoculars, what could it be? I caught up to discover they had… Continue reading Photo of the Week: Black Swallowtail Butterfly