Butterflies of Northern Illinois

If you want to see butterflies in northern Illinois then you could do much worse than take a drive out to Volo Bog, in Lake county.   When you get there you hardly even need to get out of your car, because there are butterfly gardens adjacent to the parking lot planted with flowers like this cone flower, which are native to the prairie lands which used to dominate this part of the mid-west.   This cone flower has attracted an American lady butterfly, which is sipping the nectar it needs to power itself through another day.   Of all the "lady" butterflies, this one is the most tolerant of cold, which is a useful ability in this part of the country.

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Another lady in the butterfly garden, but this time a painted lady.   Although it's very closely related, it can be distinguished from the American lady by the four small eyespots on the underside of its hind wings, rather than two large eyespots.   Naturalists like to use the expression "American ladies have big eyes" to remember the difference.   Painted ladies migrate south when the weather gets cold and north when it gets warm.

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This is what the tops of the painted lady's wings look like; the patterns on the American lady  are subtly but recognizably different.   The painted lady is also called the Cosmopolite, because they have the widest range of any butterfly, living in the Americas from the Arctic down to Panama, as well as throughout Africa, Europe and Asia.

I was one of several creatures who thought it was their lucky day when I came across a tree with a broken branch next to the path.   This red admiral is closely related to the American lady and the painted lady and, as you can see, the colors and patterns on the underside of its wings are vaguely similar.   Once it found the sap oozing from the branch it started sucking it up with its proboscis.

When the red admiral flew away from the broken branch it was kind enough to let me take a photograph of the topside of its wings as it rested on a nearby bush.   Like the other two lady butterflies, the red admiral is very hairy, which allows it to tolerate quite cold weather.   Red Admirals do migrate south in winter, but they spread very rapidly northward during spring.   The Red Admiral caterpillar mostly eats nettles, but it will also eat hops and a few other plants.   Like most caterpillars, they're quite specialized in what they will and won't eat.

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This red admiral was sitting in the middle of the path and I didn't notice it until I was almost on top of it.   It flew away, but since I knew how territorial this species is I waited and in a minute or two it came around again, flying back and forth and checking me out to see if I was a threat.   After deciding I wasn't it landed back in the path and I started very slowly maneuvering towards it on my stomach to get some closeup photos.   It flew away several times, but each time came back and I finally managed to get to within a few inches to get this photo.   On one of its forays it even started chasing a hapless bumble bee which stumbled into its airspace, and I was surprised by how quickly the red admiral flew, and how it was able to twist and turn to follow the intruder through the bushes.   Quite what it would have done if it had caught the bee I don't know!

If you look closely you'll see that it's only standing on two pairs of legs, but if you look even closer you'll see that the third pair is hooked up behind its eyes.   This is a fairly common feature of several butterfly species, but one which most people don't know about.

There's that proboscis again, but this time coiled up underneath the head.

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But back to that broken tree, which attracted more than just that red admiral.   Here a paper wasp throws a right hook to chase away a comma butterfly and the ladybird beetles have had to run to cover to avoid getting involved in the fight!   The comma is every bit as feisty as the red admiral, in fact the only time I've ever been struck by a butterfly was when a comma made several close passes at me on the path around Volo bog, and then actually hit me before flying away.

(click here to open a new window with this photo in computer wallpaper format)
click here to open a new window with this photo in computer wallpaper format

The comma, whose scientific name is Polygonia comma,  gets its name from the curved white mark on the underside of its hind wings.   There is also a related species which I've never photographed called the question mark (Polygonia interrogationis), though I have seen the question mark caterpillar.   The caterpillar of the comma prefers to eat elm leaves, nettles and hops, which is why the adult butterfly is sometimes called the "hop merchant".

The comma prefers to live on the edges of wooded areas, and when it feels threatened it retreats to a tree trunk or underside of a branch, where it perches upside down.   Like the American lady and the painted lady, the mottled gray and brown surfaces of the comma's underwings greatly resemble tree bark, and it is very well camouflaged when its wings are closed.

After drinking that sap the comma must have been very relaxed, because it allowed me to take this photo.   It's not easy to get a photo of the top of a comma's wings, they usually prefer to sit with them closed, or if they're sunning themselves they'll fly off before you can get near them, either to move somewhere else or to get closer and attack you.   This is the "orange" form of the comma which is seen later in the year; the summer or "black" form has a much darker hind wing.

Until I was preparing this page I thought that this was also a comma, however it's actually a different species, the satyr anglewing.   As its name suggests, it's a member of the anglewing family of butterflies, just like the comma and the question mark, but its hind wings don't have the dark trailing edges of the comma.   The satyr anglewing does have a white mark on the underside of its wings just like the comma, so some people call it the satyr comma, however it's completely unrelated to the large family of butterflies called satyrs, although like them it does like living in woods.

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Here's another highly territorial butterfly, the mourning cloak, which in Britain is called the Camberwell beauty, though it's very uncommon there.   Mourning cloak butterflies are very hairy, they're one of the very few butterflies which actually live right through the incredibly cold and snowy Illinois winters, which means that they're often the first butterflies that people see in spring.   Since there are no flowers for them to gather nectar at in early springtime, they depend on sap flowing from branches and twigs broken by the wind.   Like the lady and anglewing butterflies, the undersides of its wings are very well camouflaged, but if disturbed the mourning cloak will take off with an audible "click".

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Volo Bog offers quite a few different types of habitat, including (obviously) bog, forest and prairie, and it's fairly common to see swallowtails like this male Eastern tiger swallowtail in these open grassy prairie areas - however photographing them is something else!   The only photos of tiger swallowtails I got were either at a great distance as they were resting high up in a tree, or at a funny angle, like this one which allowed me to get close because it was temporarily engrossed in drinking from the flowers of a milkweed.

The only other type of swallowtail that I saw at Volo Bog was this male eastern black swallowtail.   Although it landed in a fairly good spot for a photo, it's in very poor condition, having lost the right "tail" at the back of its hindwing which gives swallowtails their name, and it has also lost various other bits and pieces along the trailing edges of all four of its wings.   This damage might have happened partly as a result of attacks by birds and partly from old age and normal wear and tear, but this individual clearly didn't begin its life as a butterfly recently.   Fortunately, you can see a photo of this same species which I took a few years later in Mexico.

Sulphur butterflies liked this pink-edge sulphur are another common inhabitant of these grassy areas.   There are blueberries growing wild within Volo Bog, which is just what pink-edged sulphurs enjoy.

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The painted lady might be the most widespread butterfly in the world, but the monarch is probably the most well-known because, although a native of the Americas, it's been introduced into many other parts of the world.   Monarchs living in the United States migrate south in September and October, those from the mid-west and east spending winter in the pine forests of the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico, and those from the western United States staying in Pacific Grove in southern California.   Unlike the painted lady, where one generation migrates south and the next generation migrates north, individual monarch butterflies will first head south, mate in early spring and then head north again, though it's usually left to their offspring to repopulate the far northern and eastern extremities of their natural range.

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click here to open a new window with this photo in computer wallpaper format

When I'm walking around I look for anything which is interesting, including birds, beetles, dragonflies, caterpillars and lots of other critters.   It happened that one day the thought came into my head that I very rarely saw any butterfly chrysalises, and the distinctive image of a monarch butterfly chrysalis popped into my head, probably because I don't know what the chrysalises of any other butterfly species look like.   Sure enough, less than five minutes after I'd had this thought, here was this monarch butterfly chrysalis staring me in the face.

The monarch butterfly chrysalis is very well known, and so is the monarch butterfly caterpillar.   Like the chrysalis and the butterfly itself, the caterpillar stores up poisons from the milkweed that it eats, making all these stages of the life cycle very unpalatable to potential predators like birds.

The monarch's bold and colorful wings, both top and bottom surfaces, are an advertisement to enemies that it's not a smart idea to eat the butterfly.

This is a male monarch, identifiable by the two dark spots on one of the black lines on the hind wings.   These dark spots are scent patches which release pheremones used to attract the females.

Ah, another monarch butterfly, one which has died and gone to daisy heaven!   But wait - this isn't a monarch butterfly at all, but an entirely different species in a different family!   This viceroy butterfly mimics the monarch in order to gain protection from its own enemies.   The easiest way to distinguish the viceroy from the monarch is by the black line across the middle of the viceroy's hind wings.

viceroy butterfly    (click here to open a new window with this photo in computer wallpaper format)

The lines might be different, but the viceroy even has the same white spots on its black body that the monarch has.   This particular viceroy is eating a frog, which probably means that it's a male in search of salts to pass on to its partner so she can grow her eggs.   This behavior is very common amongst male butterflies of many species, it often takes the form of "puddling" on the ground, sometimes on a riverbank, where the butterfly sucks up the moisture, retaining the salts but expelling the water.

viceroy butterfly and frog   (click here to open a new window with this photo in computer wallpaper format)
(click here to open a new window with this photo in computer wallpaper format)

Sucking a frog might be gross, but many otherwise cute butterflies like this great spangled fritillary go to even greater lengths to get salt, which is a surprisingly rare commodity in the natural world.

For instance, I found this great spangled fritillary at the Dead River nature reserve next to Lake Michigan, merrily sucking all the goodness out of some nice fresh dog droppings!   It's a fact of life for butterfly photographers that some of the best photographic opportunities come about in this way - it's usually best just to keep quiet about exactly what the butterfly is standing on!

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The common buckeye is one of my favorite American butterflies, because of its bold colors and patterns, particularly the "eyespots" on its front and hind wings.   These eyespots are thought to be used as a warning to birds, which don't like to be looked at by something which might be a predator.   Even if it only startles the bird for a few seconds, that can be enough time for the butterfly to make its escape.   This individual might be newly emerged from its chrysalis, because it's in excellent condition with no holes in its wings or any other signs of wear and tear.   As well as adult butterflies, Dead River is one of the few places where I've seen a buckeye caterpillar.

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This female pearly crescentspot is another inhabitant of Dead River, but it's much smaller than the buckeye.   In spite of their size, males of this species are territorial and combative, they'll leave their perch to investigate birds or even larger animals like ourselves.

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This banded hairstreak was resting in the shade of a wood at Moraine Hills state park.   Hairstreaks are a family of butterflies scattered around the world which have false antennas on their back wings.   When they're perched on a leaf they slowly rub their hind wings up and down to make it appear as if the antenna are moving - the intention is to fool any bird which might be watching, and make it peck at the wing instead of the all-important head.   Some species even go through a ritual straight after landing of turning around 180 degrees, again to trick the birds.

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See the Caterpillars of Northern Illinois, butterflies of Mexico or Vietnam, Spiders of Vietnam, or the bugs of Indonesia or Russia.