Insects of the Spring and Summer Seasons!

In today's post, David Martin talks about the emergence of the warmer seasons and the tiny winged creatures that we can expect to see at Fenner!

As winter finally releases its hold on us, and spring arrives, I start to get the itch for the warmer days that soon will arrive and the amazing little creatures that will begin emerging at Fenner.  While many people frequent Fenner for its diversity of birds, I love the equally diverse, albeit much smaller, winged creatures that also call Fenner home – dragonflies and butterflies.

Fenner has good habitat for both types of insects with its open fields, wooded ponds, and deciduous and coniferous forests.  From mid-March to early November you can find a large number of butterflies around the grounds, but the dragonflies wait until a bit later in the spring to emerge.  The first butterfly tends to be the Mourning Cloak butterfly, a Michigan native that overwinters under the bark of dead trees.  You can almost always find a dark-brown Mourning Cloak just to the east of the Woodland Pond.  Soon afterward, the Eastern Comma and Question Mark butterflies start to emerge in the wooded areas and along the edges of the fields.  The Red Admiral butterfly with its bright red stripes on dark wings also can be found in early spring and some years they will seem to be everywhere at Fenner in large numbers.

  (Question Mark butterfly, courtesy of David Martin)

As spring slowly turns to summer, the dragonflies start to emerge.  You see them about the time you start seeing the pesky mosquitoes on which they feast throughout the summer arrive.  At Fenner, the small Dot-Tailed Whiteface dragonfly and the large Common Green Darner probably will be the first dragonflies you will encounter.  Several different species of Clubtail dragonflies will also emerge in late May and early June, but soon will be gone until next year.  The large Mosaic Darner dragonflies, like the Green-Striped Darner and the Lance-Tipped Darner, start arriving and will hang around until September.  They like to patrol the fields for meals and frequent the ponds for laying their eggs.

In May and June the variety of butterflies explodes.  The fantastically colored American and Painted Lady butterflies arrive.  You can see them in the big field flitting among the wildflowers.  The ubiquitous orange and black Monarch butterfly also starts to make itself known along with its doppelganger, the Viceroy butterfly that mimics the Monarch in order to take advantage of its reputation as a bad-tasting meal.  Tiny Skippers of species too numerous to name and the miniscule Summer Azure butterflies zip by nearly unnoticed because of their diminutive size.  The American Copper, equally as small, grabs your attention with its bright orange on its upper wings.

   (Viceroy butterfly, courtesy of David Martin)

Summer brings with it several similar species of Skimmer dragonflies.  The aptly named Twelve Spotted Skimmer, Widow Skimmer, White-Tailed Skimmer, and Slaty Skimmer begin their summer-long flights at Fenner in mid-June.  The magnificently ornate wings of the Calico and Halloween Pennant dragonflies look almost like stained glass windows.  In mid-July the Meadowhawk dragonflies emerge and quickly dominate the fields at Fenner for the rest of the summer.  Several species of Meadowhawk dragonflies with names like Ruby, White-Faced, Autumn, and Cherry-Faced quickly outnumber most other dragonflies at Fenner.

The summer months also welcome large Swallowtail butterflies.  The yellow and black Eastern Tiger Swallowtail will probably be the largest butterfly you see at Fenner, but occasionally the reclusive Giant Swallowtail will flit by with its never-stopping, erratic flight pattern.  Black Swallowtail and Spicebush Swallowtail butterflies also frequent the wildflowers in fields.  As summer slowly turns to autumn, the wildly spotted and colorful Common Buckeye butterfly arrives and seems to fit right in with the changing foliage.  The Mourning Cloak butterflies from the early spring show up again in the cooler weather that they prefer.

Occasionally, Fenner even hosts a few special guests.  In the spring of 2012, I happened to photograph a number of Darner dragonflies that I could not identify at first.  Their species, the Spatterdock Darner, generally does not venture this far north, so my books did not show them in this area.  Their bright blue bodies and eyes were quite the sight to see.  In the late summer of 2012, I caught some fleeting photographs of a very special guest, a Laura’s Clubtail dragonfly.  These dragonflies are a special interest species in Michigan and are an endangered species in Canada.  I only captured a few photos, but this encounter was probably an once-in-a-lifetime experience.

 (Spatterdock Darner, courtesy of David Martin)

 

The next time you visit Fenner in warm weather, make sure to look out for the little winged creatures that play a vital role in our ecosystem.