Nancy Lawson is the author of The Humane Gardener: Nurturing a Backyard Habitat for Wildlife. A columnist for All Animals magazine, she founded Humane Gardener, an outreach initiative dedicated to animal-friendly landscaping methods. Her book and garden have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, O: The Oprah Magazine, and other media outlets.
When we invited friends over to celebrate our favorite season on Saturday, the company, food and drinks made for a great party on the patio. But our hosting prowess proved paltry compared with the rabble-rousing taking place in the milkweed, where our human guests caught a rare sight: a monarch caterpillar chowing down.
The next day, my husband, Will, found three more—a bounty we’ve never seen before in this stand of asclepias syriaca that started a few years ago with a lone volunteer plant. Keeping them company was a whole gang of other milkweed groupies, all in varying shades of orange, red and black—and all readying themselves for Will’s camera.The party attracted animals of many stripes. The ailanthus webworm moth crawling up this stalk came a long way for a good time; she’s native to Florida and ventured north during the heat of summer. She is joined here by milkweed’s most glamorous diners, the ridiculously cute caterpillars of the milkweed tiger moths.In a harmonious relationship only nature could have designed, the milkweed tiger moth prefers to eat late-season shoots, while monarch caterpillars enjoy younger shoots.The gourmet meal was clearly superior to the food being served on our patio to mere humans. This milkweed beetle was making short order of leaves many times her size. Her kind is known to lay eggs in nearby grasses, and the larvae burrow into milkweed roots. Hundreds at a time were getting some action here earlier this summer, but it appears to be last call for this lone beetle.This little fellow may have traveled even farther for the party. At first I thought he was a Peck’s skipper, but he was just too bright, and his colors too defined, to fit the bill. It turns out he might be a fiery skipper, hailing from as far away as Argentina and uncommon in this area—appropriate, considering that Will, a little uncommon himself, has family from Buenos Aires.So much trickery near the milkweed patch! I was convinced this was not a monarch because of her small size, slightly different shape and tendency to flit instead of float–a movement more characteristic of the lookalike viceroy butterfly.Several butterfly species look almost exactly like this …… but the absence of a black line curving through the middle of the hindwing pattern means that she was, in fact, a monarch, with a slightly tattered upper right wing. And she quite enjoyed the boneset—enough, I’m hoping, to have lain some eggs on the nearby milkweed and begun the cycle again.
