In the Broccoli Hills

Gratuitious butterflies. All we have to do is watch the Pearl Crescent in its favorite poison ivy or the Great Spangled Fritillary sharing nectar with a bee on a butterfly bush.  June to me is the peak of the year, the pinnacle of earthly beauty, and as I sit here ready to go to the farmer's market I see hundreds of acres of hills, bright green (called by gardener Demetrius "broccoli hills"; he'd say "Look: broccoli hills, Bun")  and every inch loaded with lives like these for the watching. Right now a bunny is eyeing the unmown grass and eyeing me to see if he or she can get away with eating it. Bunnies are many around here this year. Yesterday I saw a baby bunny too young to be scared of me. Gratuitous: Free! Revel in them; life is not forever!

Today is the seventh anniversary of the Divinebunbun's Rugged Rural Missouri blog. Thank you for following along and sharing my joys. In the city I lived with loud nightly drunken arguments and screaming, domestic battles, cop cars, boom cars that woke us all, drug houses with very irritable people just outside, and bullet holes in my car's windshield. And now. . .

Lord of the Butterflies

The landlord forbade me to garden, allowing only the raising of vegetables in containers, because he wants the 100 acres to remain completely natural, and I understand that. So I planted native coneflowers nobody can ever object to, and every type of flying creature loves them, from the nectar-sucking Great Spangled Fritillary, lord of the butterflies, who came by today, to the seed-eating goldfinches who pick the sliver-like black seeds from the dry flower heads in autumn. I enjoy the challenge of taking a photo I've never taken before.

My camera is Nikon Coolpix 8400, a 2005-era hobby camera with great optics, excellent for closeup photos; this photo was taken on its "Portrait" setting. I used to have analog SLRs, with macro and telephoto lenses, etc., and I used to buy bulk film and "roll my own" cartridges in the dark, and develop my own photos, and specialize in architectural photography -- but carrying 12 pounds of camera around my neck isn't as appealing as it used to be. Like my friend here I prefer to travel light.

Friend With Roots, Friend With Wings

The most gorgeous butterfly in the area, The Great Spangled Fritillary with its orange and black-coffee-colored wings on one side and coffee-and-cream with "eyes" and ruffles on the other, came to visit my young tomato plant yesterday. Butterflies began floating around here in March, about six weeks early, but seem to have flourished.

Great Spangled Fritillary

This baby (Speyeria cybele) stopped me in my tracks. Never saw this butterfly before, although it is said to be common in the central U.S. Elbowed through waist-high grass to get photos and video, earning me 60 chigger bites, welts from knees to armpits; the itching was cured only with applications to the skin of diluted laundry bleach (1 part bleach to 7 parts water). That was Reeve's advice. It worked. The butterfly was worth it.

Fascinatingly, the Great Spangled Fritillary's scalloped wings look different on each side: dorsal side brown with orange and yellow, pretty but nothing special (see small photo); the contrasting ventral side is silver spots on coffee-and-cream. No fabric like this has ever been woven by man. Prefers to drink from purplish flowers, and I caught this one on horsemint and, in a separate series of photos, also on coneflowers. Difficult to ID, but this website helped me and maybe you can use it too. The Great Spangled Fritillary: I couldn't have named it better. What's a fritillary? A butterfly with tiny front legs that have no claws. Everybody else's front legs have claws. If the photos are greatly enlarged it can be seen that their front legs aren't good for clinging to anything.