Volunteering at Wings of Fancy at Brookside Gardens V-X

In the training for volunteers at Brookside Gardens’ Wings of Fancy, they told us it would take about 10 shifts to feel comfortable with all the roles; I have that many now and have decided that it’s all about getting comfortable enough to accept the variability in the people that come to the exhibit and the environment (temperature, humidity) during the shifts. There has been something unique about each of my shifts so far…and I’ve enjoyed the 30 minutes I have walking around the gardens before each shift – taking pictures there and then locking my camera in a locker while I am busy with my shift. So – here are some images and notes from my July shifts at Wings of Fancy!

Before the 5^th shift, I noticed moisture on a very thorny plant and a small green insect (grasshopper?) that was decorating a yellow flower (also full of water droplets).

I walked toward the anniversary grove and saw a very trusting chipmunk. During the unique event of the shift inside the butterfly exhibit were owl caterpillars. They had hatched from eggs laid on a canna plant. They were so tiny compared to the butterfly they will eventually become!

The walk before the 6^th shift was frustrating. I only had my cell phone with me and there were so many insects that I saw but couldn’t photography well without the zoom of my camera. I did take a picture of the construction going at the Nature Center next door to the Brookside Gardens Conservatories. Inside the butterfly house there were mystery caterpillars! They had hatched from eggs laid on a plant in the basil family – not one that is normally deemed to be a host plant. But the caterpillars were growing like crazy eating it. They were thought to be tropical swallowtail caterpillars. One had already made a chrysalis.

I brought my camera to use on my walk before the 7^th shift. I took a couple of zoomed pictures of some flowers along the boardwalk between the conservatories and the nature center.

But best picture was of a very black dragonfly…a picture I would have missed if I’d only had my cell phone. Inside the caterpillar house there were still 3 cecropia moth caterpillars but they were all huge. It won’t be long before they will all be cocoons and we’ll need other stars for the caterpillar part of the exhibit.

I took even more insect pictures before the 8^th shift – all along the walk up to the ticket taking station to the butterfly exhibit. There were bees and skippers all over the cone flowers.

And a milkweed bug on some milkweed. The unique event of the shift was that the volunteer contingent was short the ticket taker so I moved from being a flight attendant to ticket taker. It was good to be outdoors for the shift but I prefer the flight attendant role.

Before the 9^th shift, I walked over to the anniversary grove and saw the chipmunk again. As I walked back toward the Conservatories, I saw a flower that was poised to unfurl

And a wasp exploring on a nearby plant.

I walked through the parking lot to check the boardwalk and found  Joe-Pye Weed before I got there….and it was full of butterflies. I took picture of two spice bush swallowtail butterflies. One was very battered and the other in better condition.

Inside the caterpillar house the new stars were Monarch and Queen caterpillars. They were too small to tell apart (without a magnifying glass – which we didn’t have). All the cecropia moths had made their cocoons.

The walk before the 10^th shift started at the Joe Pye Weed. There were at least 8 eastern tiger swallowtails on the plants! The ones with more blue around the bottom edge of the wings are females; the ones without blue are the males.

There are beginning to be some precursors to fall from the trees

Although there are still a lot of flowers full of pollen for bees (like this hibiscus).

The unique part of shift was the key lime plant was drawing tropical swallowtails to lay eggs. Many of the visitors not only got to see eggs already on the plant but butterflies in the act. As I was explaining what was happening to a group, a butterfly landing on my hand and laid an egg on my ring (a very confused butterfly, obviously)!

Previous posts re Volunteering at Wings of Fancy: prep, I, II-IV.

Tiger Swallowtail on Pickerel Weed

The Tiger Swallowtail is one of the most common butterflies we see in Maryland; we have a lot of tulip poplar trees which are food plants for its caterpillar. I enjoy photographing Tiger Swallowtails and indulged when a male Tiger Swallowtail was fluttering about a stand of Pickerel Weed at Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens last week. It seemed to start out at the bottom of the flower stalks and work upward in a spiral around the stalk. It never methodically sampled every flower…but tended to move on to another stalk when it got to the top of one. The whole sequence of 41 images below happening in about 3 minutes! It was a busy butterfly. I liked getting the different angles of the butterfly feeding…the varying levels of zoom. There was a bee that stole the show in one (#7 in the slide show).

Nature Photography with Belmont Summer Camp – Part 2

The second group of campers were older…up to 12 years old. Their photoshoot was immediately after the younger group and we decided not to go down the tick infested trail. They wanted to go to the forest but we trekked made a loop into the formal gardens along the way. The sweet gum trees had green fruit (above) and some of the campers took pictures of newly forming pecans. In the formal gardens, there were insects (bees and several kinds of butterflies) to challenge photographic skills.

Everyone enjoyed taking water lily pictures in the pool that is a popular backdrop for weddings at Belmont. One of the gardeners talked to the campers about water lilies closing their blooms at night…and continuing to bloom through the summer…and taking out the underwater parts of the plants during winter to replant next spring.

Then it was off to the forest. The only picture I took was of a millipede…the campers kept me too busy to notice more.

On the hike back to the Nature Center, we stopped the male and female gingko trees near the Belmont caretaker house…and the female tree was loaded with fruit. Fortunately, they were not ripe yet – since I’ve heard they smell awful by the time they drop from the tree.

Volunteering at Wings of Fancy at Brookside Gardens II-IV

I now have a total of 4 shifts volunteering at Brookside Gardens’ Wings of Fancy. I allow about 30 minutes before my 4 hour shift begins to walk around the gardens using my phone to take pictures. (I’m too busy during the shift itself to take any pictures at all.) I’ve never visited Brookside as frequently….and there is still something new to notice each time I am there. Before my second shift, I photographed the conservatory (note the door for staff and volunteers in front of the red car…almost surrounded by foliage),

A view through the tall deer fence into the Brookside Nature Center area,

A cat bird that was close enough to photograph with the phone, and

A cluster for flowers (yellow and pink surrounded by green).

The highpoints of the day included a group of 66 pre-schoolers at the butterfly exhibit. I was at the caterpillar station (which is before the entrance to the conservatory where the butterflies are flying about) when they came through with their chaperones (2 children per chaperone). I showed them the cecropia moth caterpillars (very large), told them to look at the butterflies with their eyes – not to touch, and sent them on to see the butterflies inside the conservatory. Later when I was at the exit station, a very confused butterfly was laying eggs on one of the metal stanchions that designates where to line up for the exit; there were quite a few elementary aged children (and some grandparents) that were there to see the drama too.

Before my third sift, it was sprinkling, but I walked a short distance out the pedestrian gate to take a picture of the plantings and sign at the gate of the gardens.

Then I walked down the gravel path of the anniversary grove (just inside the gate) and found some odd white blobs on a bald cypress. When I got home I did some research and discovered they are made by the Cypress Twig Gall Midge. It will kill the twig but the tree survives.

The highpoints of the day included: a wandering cecropia moth that was determined to leave the branch of black cherry leaves to make a cocoon (the caterpillar was put into a case with a branch where it made its cocoon) and seeing some tiny parasitoid wasps that had emerged from a chrysalis (rather than a butterfly). The containment precautions that are taken with the exhibit are not just for butterflies! Exotic parasitoids could be bad for our local environment too.

Before my fourth shift, I found some developing cones on a bald cypress (to compare with the Cypress Twig Gall that I saw the previous shift (and decided to check the galls each time I go to Brookside…see how they develop), and

Took several zoomed pictures of flowers that look ‘painterly.’

The highlights of the day included a group of Garden Bloggers and a fellow volunteer with Howard Country Conservancy visiting the exhibit with her family.

I’ve grouped the best of the rest of my pictures into themes: benches (aligned with a hedge, covered with lichen and crowded by flowers, and a butterfly bench in the shade.

Of course, there were flowers (and the seed pod of the Jack-in-the-Pulpit hiding under its leaves).

Insects (a bee in a hollyhock, a tiger swallowtail on a cone flower, a dragon fly on a bench, and a gold striped dragonfly…I wished from my better camera for that last one).

Pathways (to the azaleas, new boards in the walk between the Conservatory and the Nature Center, and gravel to the anniversary grove).

On the rainy morning, I got a picture of the metal butterflies without the blinding glare of the sun and savored the water collecting on leaves.

Previous post about Wing of Fancy Volunteering is here.

Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens in June 2017 – Insects

We made our first visit of the year to Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens yesterday. There are so many things I noticed in the gardens that I am doing multiple posts: insects, birds, waterlilies, magnolias, lotus, and turtles. There are three types of insects I’ll highlight: bees, butterflies, and dragonflies. The bumblebee I photographed was on a buttonbush. Most of the plants are not in bloom yet so the few lowers were very popular. I noticed that there was only one bee per flower! The pickerel weeds were in full bloom and they were attracting bees as well.

I photographed a tiger swallowtail on the pickerel weed. There were not very many butterflies around the garden yet. Perhaps there will be more as the summer progresses.

The main insect my husband and it try to photograph at the gardens is dragonflies. They seemed to be a lot of them flying around but not as many were sitting long enough to photography. I managed to get at 6 different kinds: greenish area around wing attachment with brownish ‘dash’ near tip of otherwise clear wings,

Could be a different perspective on the same kind…or not (the wing attachment area does not look green and the clear part of the wings has an amber tinge),

Brownish red coloring and smaller than the previous dragonflies,

Fuzzy at wing attachment and black markings across the wings (clear tips of wing) – maybe Common Whitetail male,

Brown body and black markings across the wings (dark tips of wings) – maybe a Common Whitetail female, and

Clear wings outlined in black around the tip.

I’m sure we’ll go to the gardens again this summer. I wonder if I’ll see the same or different dragonflies.

3 free eBooks – January 2017

Furnishings – butterflies – tiles….3 interesting topics that seem to be my themes for eBooks this month.

Tracy, Berry B. (curator). 19^th Century America Furniture and Other Decorative Arts. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1970. Available from Internet Archive here. The objects were included in an exhibit in 1970 – with this book recording it all. I found the ‘other decorative arts’ even better than the furniture.

Weed, Clarence Moores. Butterflies. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company for Nelson Doubleday, Inc. 1927. Available from Hathi Trust here. I liked the vivid colors of the illustrations. Butterflies are generally colorful but the backgrounds were just a vivid in this book. Do you recognize the Tiger Swallowtail?

Campbell Brick and Tile Co. Designs for encaustic and geometrical tile pavements, also of encaustic, glazed, majolic̀a, and other tiles for hearths, fireplaces. Leicester: J. Fleming & Co. 1877. Available from Hathi Trust here. I like decorative tile…great ideas of Zentangles and (maybe) a renovation project for my house!