It was raining when the sun came up in Estabrook Park this morning, and it rained pretty steadily till almost 9 a.m. Since there didn’t appear to be any significant gaps nor heavy downpours, I grabbed an umbrella and headed out.
I guess it is a little remarkable that I didn’t get a single bird picture, but not too surprising. I did see these two, however, in the meadow on my way back south from the boat ramp, and that’s not too shabby. Oh, and you can see that the Parks Department has mowed the lawn again, but only a thin strip this time on either side of what is left of the gravel road through the middle, which is a nice improvement over last time. So, if one of you whispered in their ear to convince them to leave more flowers, it worked, and thanks! Yay!
The rain finally petered out as I approached the south end, and the hungry butterflies were the first to emerge. Here’s a monarch sampling the nectar from recently opened burdock blossoms.
And here’s a summer azure just parked on a leaf in the herb garden by the Benjamin Church House. If you look closely, you can see that the hindwings don’t quite line up with each other. In fact, it was slowly alternating which one it rotated forward while rotating the other rearward. I’ve seen this before, and today is the day I finally decided to try looking it up.
Well, I’m sure you will be as fascinated to learn as I just was that on butterflies in the same family (Lycaenidae) that have tails and eye spots on their hind wings, such as the banded hairstreak and eastern tailed blue, this behavior is “hypothesized to mimic a head with moving antennae [and is called] the ‘false head effect’,” and is “likely to deflect attacks away from vital parts.” I can only guess that other butterflies in the same family that do not have tails and spots simply inherited the ‘false head effect’ behavior anyway. Wild, huh?
Signs of Life in Estabrook Park 