The Morning Cloak Butterfly

In today's post, David Martin talks about the arrival of spring

 with the habits of the Morning Cloak butterfly.

Bird enthusiasts will often claim that spring has finally arrived once certain birds migrate back to Michigan, like the American Robin, the Red-Winged Blackbird, or the Sandhill Crane. However, the emergence of a much smaller winged creature might actually be a better harbinger of warmer weather – the Mourning Cloak butterfly.

The Mourning Cloak butterfly is

the earliest butterfly you can see at Fenner in the springtime.

The Mourning Cloak butterfly (Nymphalis antiopa) is one of the toughest butterflies in Michigan. Unlike many other species of butterflies, the Mourning Cloak butterfly overwinters at Fenner instead of migrating south. It nestles into dense brush, behind loose tree bark, or even under roof shingles to survive the cold winter temperatures. When the daylight hours start to get longer, the Mourning Cloak butterfly will emerge from its hibernation, often when snow still is on the ground. You may even see them at Fenner in late March.

The Mourning Cloak butterfly has large, dark colored wings that soak up sunrays and keep them warm on the chilly spring days. You can see them in sunny areas with their wings outspread and droopily relaxed, trying to warm up their cold wings before flying. This behavior is called “basking”. The bottom sides of its wings are a mottled brown and gray color that helps it blend into its habitat and camouflage it from predators.

Mourning Cloak butterfly basking

on a newly budding branch in early April 2012.

In the early spring, the Mourning Cloak butterfly emerges and begins to look for its springtime meal of tree sap. It likes the same sugar maple sap collected at Fenner during the Maple Syrup Festival. The Mourning Cloak butterfly also likes the sap of many other trees, especially oak tree sap – definitely not the kind you would put on your pancakes! As the sap slows later in the spring and other sources of food emerge, the Mourning Cloak butterfly will get its nutrients from rotting fruit and sometimes flower nectar. Like many types of butterflies, the Mourning Cloak will also land on certain types of damp soil to lick up minerals and even do the same with animal droppings. This behavior is called “puddling”.

Mourning Cloak butterfly puddling

on the gravel portion of a trail at Fenner.

When spring turns to summer and the weather gets hot and dry, the Mourning Cloak butterfly will find a good place to hide away and go into a type of summer hibernation called “aestivation”. As the weather cools in the late summer and autumn, the Mourning Cloak butterfly emerges again to feast on the late summer fruits before finding a place to nestle down for winter. It is not uncommon to see this butterfly in October or early November at Fenner, especially if we have mild and damp fall weather.

The bottom side of the Mourning Cloak butterfly’s 

wings are patterned to provide camouflage to hide it from predators.

In addition to its early spring emergence and late fall hibernation, the Mourning Cloak butterfly tops the record books in a couple other ways. It has a wingspan between 3 to 4 inches, making it one of the larger butterflies you may see at Fenner. For comparison, the Monarch butterfly has a similar wingspan size. The Mourning Cloak butterfly also has one of the longest lifespans of butterflies and can live up to a year. Most will not winter over twice, but they do outlive most of their butterfly counterparts.

This Mourning Cloak butterfly photographed in the early spring 

has tattered wings and probably overwintered at Fenner from the previous autumn.

You can find Mourning Cloak butterflies all over Fenner, but they prefer the more wooded areas because those contain their source of food. Just east of the Woodland Pond along the east side of the Tamarack Trail, there is a low area where it stays damp much of the spring and fall. There are plenty of the Mourning Cloak’s favorite trees in this area and you can almost always find a few of this type of butterfly flitting around or sunning themselves in the spring or fall. Some of them are very friendly and may even land on your clothing if it is a color similar to the tree bark!

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.