Camouflage.

You can blend-in in the country and stand out in the fashion world...

(Gotta love Brad Paisley—to be able to have hit songs about camouflage and ticks, for crying out loud. Awesome.)

When camouflage works [find the butterfly]:

Always look near the center of the photo. To be fair, this Henry’s Elfin is tiny—far less than an inch long.

When camouflage doesn’t work:

Found this very large—book notes average size up to 57mm wingspan and this glorious creature was easily over 60mm—moth on my shed door. (That door is becoming a very good place to find stuff!)

Had the Tulip Tree Beauty been on the trunk of the tulip tree, I doubt I would have seen it at all...

[Have been taking lots of photos lately so of course I'm falling way behind. I may be doing a bit of backtracking, like here where these photos are going on a month old. Sorry.]

Play Date.

Taking advantage of the fact we are (much to my surprise) having a Real Spring, I purposefully went on a wander earlier this week with my new Lensbaby system--a set of creative lenses that basically do special effects in-camera (saving hours of time at the computer messing around with an image editing program that I don't really know how to use anyway).

I made a point of stopping at two of my "must photograph here some day" locations: An old, old house still standing (barely) on the side of Route 47 and an even older cemetery in Cold Spring. Here's a sampling including stops at Cape May Point State Park on the same afternoon and Belleplain State Forest the following morning; many of these photos will develop into blog posts of their own.

One unexpected bonus of the Lensbaby lenses is that even though they were made specifically for "creative" work, the resulting photographs don't have to shout Special Effects! Because they are quality optics you can be quite subtle; this shot was taken in Belleplain State Forest with the Edge 80:

Even if a half-inch long butterfly lands a few feet away from you while you are shooting landscapes, you can crop like crazy and still end up with a decent image. (American Copper, one of two that fluttered past me in the cemetery.)

North end of Reeds Beach -

Shorebird Banding starts today!

No carnage, all cuteness...

Found this gorgeous little thing (Red-banded Hairstreak) at eye level in some giant fennel at the gardens up the road from my place in mid-July... A relatively quiet year for butterflies, but what we had were pretty spectacular.

What's in a name?

Names can be a nuisance. They either get it right or get it wrong. And sometimes they correct a misnomer...

Eastern Tent Caterpillar:

This is the variety found in the eastern US (yes, there's a western species) and they are not only social caterpillars, they build a three-dimensional triangular web--aka, tent--in the fork of a branch of their food plant and retreat into it for safety (and possibly for temperature regulation).

Forest Tent Caterpillar:

Okay, looks a bit like an Eastern Tent, but this one is predominately blue. Taxonomically, these two are cousins, both assigned the genus Malacosoma. Forest tent caterpillars, like Eastern, are also social, in that they hang out together with their siblings on their preferred tree when they aren't eating. (Many moth caterpillars are gregarious; butterfly caterpillars tend to be loners.) Forest Tent caterpillars do not, however, form tents…

Juniper Hairstreak:

This stunning little (it's maybe an inch long if it stretches its wings) butterfly's caterpillars feed on red cedar trees. Which aren't really cedars… They're, well, junipers.

A rose is a rose is a rose and by any other name… Gosh, I sure hope so.

It really IS purple...

On my way down my drive one morning last summer I managed to spot a Red Spotted Purple catching the light just the right way to actually show the "purple" of its name instead of the usual peacock blue. The camera didn't quite catch the full effect, but you can definitely see purple… (If you look really closely, you can even see the red spots, too.)

Insect Collection II

A typical cold, wet, dreary Mid-Atlantic winter day needs a bit of lightening and warming up, so here are some photos from this summer I've (inadvertently) saved for a needy day... And the premise of my Insect Collection series: Use a camera instead of a jar with a nail-polish-remover-soaked cotton ball in it.

A skipper dusted with...pollen?

An ocola skipper, a rarity that showed up in Cape May in numbers in 2012.

Least Skipper. Hard to tell from this how tiny it really is.

(Photo is at least twice life size.)

Gray Hairstreak, topside. (Ailanthus moth behind it.)

Fiery Skipper on aster. Definitely one of my top-ten favorite shots of 2012.

Migrating Monarchs.

Yesterday afternoon, my mother reported that my uncle had told her that the monarchs were numerous in a little park across the street from our shore houses. A good flight was passing through Cape May Point the same day, so on my way home from there I decided to stop in at Stone Harbor Point as evening approached. SHPt has built up some wonderful natural habitat in the 18 years I've lived here full time, and has become a reliable spot for spotting migrating fall monarchs.

We'd had couple of well-populated roosting sites (~1500-2000 individuals Saturday, ~1000) Sunday in just one location at the very tip of New Jersey over the weekend, so I figured I had a chance at finding a roost at the end of Seven Mile Island as well on Monday. Monarchs migrate during the day and settle together in evergreens to wait out cool fall nights; the island had a bunch still flying south as I drove through, so I knew they were going to have to put down somewhere well north of the jumping point for crossing the Delaware Bay some dozen miles to the south.

As I had noted the evening before farther south, quite a lot of monarchs were still fluttering indecisively about Stone Harbor Point. After a quick walk up to the dune crossover to see what was coming in from the north and where they were heading (and to note that the goldenrod a mere ten miles or so north of Cape May Point was about a day or two behind the full bloom that had just started in Cape May), then down the dirt road to check out the vegetation, I returned to the parking lot only to find a roost literally at the end of the street I'd come in on.

One windswept cedar was collecting the majority of the butterflies--as well as a Red-breasted Nuthatch who politely remained on the windward side of the tree and left the roosting (and toxic) monarchs alone. Interestingly, a few lone monarchs had taken up perches on a couple of other trees… The human theory on communal roosting is that it provides protection-in-numbers from predators that don't know not to eat the bright, don't-eat-me colored butterflies (toxic due to the fact that their caterpillar stage consumes only milkweed, can tolerate the poisonous stuff and then incorporate the toxins into the adult butterfly) and possible insulation from cool night air due to the sheer body mass that can accumulate in a big roost during a large wave of butterfly migration.

A roost of about 85 individuals doesn't pack nearly so much punch as seeing twenty times that amount, but it is still pretty damn impressive.

As you can see, monarchs roost with wings closed. Not only does this reduce surface area (thereby conserving as much heat as a cold "blooded" animal is capable of), the underwing pattern provides a relatively effective camouflage; I certainly had to look twice to tell monarchs from dead cedar twigs when not so far away… But incoming individuals tend to disturb the already-settled ones, rousing the roost into motion. I was certain I could hear wee little voices exclaiming "Eh, don't land on me!" and "Hey, I was here first--go find your own spot!" as new butterflies circled in to land and the dead-still ones fluttered briefly back to life with whisper-light complaints.

And not one of the half dozen or so people that drove into the parking lot while I was there asked me why I was staring into a seemingly empty, scraggly tree…

Belleplain, Early June.

Tarkiln Pond: a very pretty location as well as productive for all sorts of flora and fauna. Located along the northern border of Cape May County in Belleplain State Forest.

Veggin' the edge. Botanizing the blacktop… A large percentage of roadside plants are non-native, but they are numerous and beautiful. (And fearless leader Mike Crewe knows them all. As he should--for him, they are natives!)

Forget flowers; this onion (your everyday oniongrass, the non-native common wild onion) just clones more baby onions that will simply drop off and, hopefully, take root. (Mike has dubbed it the "Rasta Onion"… Walks with Mike are always amusing as well as educational.)

Deptford pink. A non-native but very lovely little flower.

Tony really gets into this birds and bugs and botany stuff…

It might be some species of tiger moth caterpillar. As thorough as my huge (nearly 2 inch thick) caterpillar guide is, it has a photo of a near-identical cat titled "Agreeable Tiger Moth" but with little info beyond that.

I'm not even going to try for an id on this "inchworm" (more like inch-and-a-half worm) but a closer look by Mike at a haphazardly nibbled bush along the roadside turned up the culprit and it cooperated for its portrait.

Where's a Peterson's Eastern Moths Guide when you need one???

Nearly the smallest example of its order (damselflies), a Fragile Forktail. It's little more than an inch long in real life--the inchworm was considerably bigger.

American Lady. She looks large in this photo, but she was actually a very small representative of her species.

American Copper. This is as wee a little butterfly as it appears.

Much to my surprise, I'm very quickly falling in love with waterlilies… (With Photoshop's "Ink Outline" filter this time.)

This web's maker was nowhere to be found. Some orb weavers are more nocturnal than not, so she may have been hiding under the sluice. With my vertigo, I certainly was not going to lean over to look for her, guard rail or no guard rail.

Wow! Blue and violet together on a damselfly; my favorite colors on a favorite critter. ("Variable Dancer"--who comes up with these names?!)

A quite striking female Spangled Skimmer. (Note that dragonflies hold their wings out flat, for the most part. Damselflies hold their wings over their backs, for the most part. There are always exceptions.)

And a more subtle but just as striking female Ebony Jewelwing.

This male Sparkling Jewelwing is even more impressive a creature. A rather appropriate name, too, as these particular damselflies (there were four males flitting about in the sun alongside the Tuckahoe River) were so iridescent that they really did appear to sparkle!

What trip leaders do after a walk while waiting for sandwiches at a local custard-stand-type eatery. It appeared to be some kind of football (not soccer--Mike is a Brit) crossed with volleyball…

(Sparkling Jewelwing male again)