Each year I have a crop of black swallowtails in my garden (last year I did a day-by-day blog on their growth from an egg to butterfly), and I must have tons of rolls of film from them. Just when you think you've taken the best picture, they'll do something new. One I regret missing this year was the emergence of the second butterfly-- a snail had climbed up the African Iris frond it was drying itself on and craned its neck out to touch the butterfly. Sure that it was probably thinking, "What about their legs... they don't need their legs..." (LOTR), I knocked the snail off, and then thought, "Darn! My camera!"

Last year I found that I was losing quite a few caterpillars to storms and built up my arm muscles hauling the plant on and off the porch. That was way too much trouble and I almost lost the plant to aphids. This year, once I found eggs on the plant, I bought a beach tent from Target and put it up over the plant. I still brought in the eggs to hatch, and once the caterpillars were about an inch long, put them outside. That gives them a better chance against lizards, birds, and bigger caterpillars eating the branch out from under them.

Their palace:

Here are the best pictures I took from this month's bunch. I love how you can see the wrinkles on his paws in this one:


Here two big ones are eating flowers from the same spray:

Finally, they fought over the leftover branch:

Eventually the upset one climbed down to a branch below, sending the other one flinging backwards. This is a closeup of one eating the fronds:

On this one, I just loved the colors:

This one is ready to form its chrysalis. You can see the white frothy web its made as a base if you look closely at the leaf, as well as the silk hammock around its middle, which will stay in place when it changes into a chrysalis, and the web sticking its bottom to the plant.

This one has just climbed out of its chrysalis. You can still see the leftovers in the bottom of the casing--those all run to the bottom the morning the butterfly is ready to emerge, and you can see the wingspots through the chrysalis right before it breaks out.

The butterfly's body is swollen with liquid to help inflate its wings, so once they're fully unfurled, the butterfly has to squeeze out the extra liquid. Otherwise, it's too heavy to take off. Here you can see some of it next to the chrysalis.

I took this one this morning while it was deciding whether or not to take off:

This is the first butterfly of the season doing its run up the "runway":

And finally, a beautiful closeup of its wing from this morning, which I took doing a serious half moon pose to get to the back of the garden. Yowch!