After a week and a half on the road, it was great for me to be able to return to my local marshland yesterday. I was thrilled to see that butterflies have reappeared, including Great Spangled Fritillary butterflies (Speyeria cybele). A group of about a half dozen or so of them kept returning to clusters of a pink-flowered plant that looks like a kind of milkweed, permitting me to get shots of the butterflies in various positions on the flowers.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
That’s great you’re finally seeing butterflies around there, Mike – excellent photo subjects that show amazing colors and patterns. I’m just back from a week hunting butterflies around Chattanooga TN with the North American Butterfly Ass’n biennial meeting, and will be posting some of my pictures soon of the more than 50 species we saw (including 22 I’d never seen before).
Such great work – good enough to publish in a book
Great pictures! I wish you could send some butterflies to southern Illinois. Our numbers are lower than low.
Nice ones! I wonder what kind of milkweed that is. It doesn’t look quite like the common or swamp milkweed we have here.
Purple Milkweed (Asclepias purpurascens). Kevin Munroe, park manager at Huntley Meadows, designated Purple Milkweed as a “plant of interest” due to the fact that it is officially a rare plant species in the state of Virginia (S2) [see p. 10]. http://www.dcr.virginia.gov/natural_heritage/documents/plantlist09.pdf
Gardening season does not truly begin before the butterflies arrive.
That is an interesting milkweed that I’ve never seen. It has a beautiful color that is enhanced by the beauty of that butterfly.
Thanks. The colors of the butterfly and the flower are striking and somehow seem to work well together (along with the green of the background).
That’s a beautiful set Mike
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