Butterflies of Northern Illinois

If you want to see butterflies in northern Illinois then you could do much worse than take a drive out to Volo Bog, in Lake county.   When you get there you hardly even need to get out of your car, because there are butterfly gardens adjacent to the parking lot planted with flowers like this cone flower, which are native to the prairie lands which used to dominate this part of the mid-west.   This cone flower has attracted an American lady butterfly, which is sipping the nectar it needs to power itself through another day.   Of all the "lady" butterflies, this one is the most tolerant of cold, which is a useful ability in this part of the country.

This is what the tops of the painted lady's wings look like; the patterns on the American lady  are subtly but recognizably different.   The painted lady is also called the Cosmopolite, because they have the widest range of any butterfly, living in the Americas from the Arctic down to Panama, as well as throughout Africa, Europe and Asia.

When the red admiral flew away from the broken branch it was kind enough to let me take a photograph of the topside of its wings as it rested on a nearby bush.   Like the other two lady butterflies, the red admiral is very hairy, which allows it to tolerate quite cold weather.   Red Admirals do migrate south in winter, but they spread very rapidly northward during spring.   The Red Admiral caterpillar mostly eats nettles, but it will also eat hops and a few other plants.   Like most caterpillars, they're quite specialized in what they will and won't eat.

But back to that broken tree, which attracted more than just that red admiral.   Here a paper wasp throws a right hook to chase away a comma butterfly and the ladybird beetles have had to run to cover to avoid getting involved in the fight!   The comma is every bit as feisty as the red admiral, in fact the only time I've ever been struck by a butterfly was when a comma made several close passes at me on the path around Volo bog, and then actually hit me before flying away.

The comma, whose scientific name is Polygonia comma,  gets its name from the curved white mark on the underside of its hind wings.   There is also a related species which I've never photographed called the question mark (Polygonia interrogationis), though I have seen the question mark caterpillar.   The caterpillar of the comma prefers to eat elm leaves, nettles and hops, which is why the adult butterfly is sometimes called the "hop merchant".

The comma prefers to live on the edges of wooded areas, and when it feels threatened it retreats to a tree trunk or underside of a branch, where it perches upside down.   Like the American lady and the painted lady, the mottled gray and brown surfaces of the comma's underwings greatly resemble tree bark, and it is very well camouflaged when its wings are closed.

After drinking that sap the comma must have been very relaxed, because it allowed me to take this photo.   It's not easy to get a photo of the top of a comma's wings, they usually prefer to sit with them closed, or if they're sunning themselves they'll fly off before you can get near them, either to move somewhere else or to get closer and attack you.   This is the "orange" form of the comma which is seen later in the year; the summer or "black" form has a much darker hind wing.

Here's another highly territorial butterfly, the mourning cloak, which in Britain is called the Camberwell beauty, though it's very uncommon there.   Mourning cloak butterflies are very hairy, they're one of the very few butterflies which actually live right through the incredibly cold and snowy Illinois winters, which means that they're often the first butterflies that people see in spring.   Since there are no flowers for them to gather nectar at in early springtime, they depend on sap flowing from branches and twigs broken by the wind.   Like the lady and anglewing butterflies, the undersides of its wings are very well camouflaged, but if disturbed the mourning cloak will take off with an audible "click".

Sulphur butterflies liked this pink-edge sulphur are another common inhabitant of these grassy areas.   There are blueberries growing wild within Volo Bog, which is just what pink-edged sulphurs enjoy.

When I'm walking around I look for anything which is interesting, including birds, beetles, dragonflies, caterpillars and lots of other critters.   It happened that one day the thought came into my head that I very rarely saw any butterfly chrysalises, and the distinctive image of a monarch butterfly chrysalis popped into my head, probably because I don't know what the chrysalises of any other butterfly species look like.   Sure enough, less than five minutes after I'd had this thought, here was this monarch butterfly chrysalis staring me in the face.

The monarch butterfly chrysalis is very well known, and so is the monarch butterfly caterpillar.   Like the chrysalis and the butterfly itself, the caterpillar stores up poisons from the milkweed that it eats, making all these stages of the life cycle very unpalatable to potential predators like birds.

This is a male monarch, identifiable by the two dark spots on one of the black lines on the hind wings.   These dark spots are scent patches which release pheremones used to attract the females.

The lines might be different, but the viceroy even has the same white spots on its black body that the monarch has.   This particular viceroy is eating a frog, which probably means that it's a male in search of salts to pass on to its partner so she can grow her eggs.   This behavior is very common amongst male butterflies of many species, it often takes the form of "puddling" on the ground, sometimes on a riverbank, where the butterfly sucks up the moisture, retaining the salts but expelling the water.

Sucking a frog might be gross, but many otherwise cute butterflies like this great spangled fritillary go to even greater lengths to get salt, which is a surprisingly rare commodity in the natural world.

For instance, I found this great spangled fritillary at the Dead River nature reserve next to Lake Michigan, merrily sucking all the goodness out of some nice fresh dog droppings!   It's a fact of life for butterfly photographers that some of the best photographic opportunities come about in this way - it's usually best just to keep quiet about exactly what the butterfly is standing on!

This female pearly crescentspot is another inhabitant of Dead River, but it's much smaller than the buckeye.   In spite of their size, males of this species are territorial and combative, they'll leave their perch to investigate birds or even larger animals like ourselves.