The Butterflies are Back
Shari and I went to Forsythe NWR on Saturday to meet up with Sylvia and get out for some pictures of birds, bugs and critters. The weather was gorgeous, if a bit windy, but it didn’t stop us from having a good time.
Despite the wind, we were all able to get really nice looks at this gorgeous American Lady – and dozens more like here. There were butterflies galore at Forsythe – finally, there are butterflies around again…
I also spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what this butterfly was. It turned out to only be a Red Admiral, although it appears to be a partially melanistic one since it has no color along it’s ventral side (normally, they look like this.
It wouldn’t have been that big a deal, but the winds made it tough to see and even hard to get a picture. But it was the thousands of greenheads that really made it difficult. I’d never seen anything like it – they were everywhere, swarming the car by the hundreds. Only vigorous and repeated applications of bug spray held them at bay. But despite the bugs, we actually had a good time. Since the weather was so nice and we were getting such beautiful light, we actually went around twice, with different stuff each tme.
I’m a little jealous of the shot she got of a Gull-billed Tern, a new species for me. I didn’t get any good shots of this species, but I got some good shots of others, so I’m not complaining. In addition to adding the tern to my lifelist, I also added a Clapper Rail, a species I’m sure that I have seen before but have never seen well enough to ‘call it’. There was no doubt about this one – I’ll try to post the pictures later. And I managed to get some photo lifelist shots of birds I had seen before, like this beautiful Glossy Ibis:
While Shari was mostly focused on the birds, I was getting into the many, many butterflies and dragonflies that were all over Forsythe. I added a new dragonfly species – Needham’s Skimmer (below), and I think I saw one or two others that I’ve never seen before but didn’t see clearly enough to ID this time.
Overall, it was a good day out with only a few bug bites as payment (although our friend Sylvia seems to be allergic to greenheads and reacted much worse – sorry about that Sylvia!!). This weekend we’re going to Cape May to celebrate our 5th anniversary, so hopefully we’ll have plenty of opportunities to see new and interesting stuff – at least, in between sleeping on the beach and, well…
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That dragonfly is my new desktop. My son will love it, he has this uncanny knack for getting dragonflies to land on him.
Man. Those are some fantastic shots. The Glossy Ibis is fascinating, and I just love the dragonfly and the butterflies. I don’t think you ever answered my question about what lens you use for the bugs. I think the one I was asking about is actually Shari’s macro? That’s the impression I got. Anyway, what is it?
I had to look up what greenheads are. I don’t think we get them here, but they seem to be related to horse flies, which we do get. I hate those things …
Van – desktop away… I’ll have to bring little Van out the next time we look for them, so that he can attract them for pictures…
Michael – sorry about that, must have forgotten or missed it. my standard lens is my Nikon 80-400VR f/4.5-6.3 on my D200. 90% of what I shoot comes out of there. For macro shots, I do use my wife’s 105mm (sweet, sweet, SWEET lens) or my older 70-300mm Sigma zoom-macro. The quality isn’t as nice as the 105mm by a long shot, but it does have the trade-off of being able to be a little further away (less spooking of the subject).
As for the greenheads (officially, the salt marsh greenhead fly – Tabanus nigrovittatus), they’re a little smaller than the horseflies I’m used to, but they swarm. Think of the bastard spawn of a horsefly and a blackfly, and that’s about it. Here’s a picture of one, if you want to see these annoying little buggers.
Thanks to you both for the compliments. It was fun day out there.
You know I just love when you are photographing butterflies! Also, that ibis is such an amazing photo even though it isn’t a butterfly!