Wildlife Watching Wednesday: Beautiful Pipevine Swallowtail Butterflies
By: Tom Berg
Most people agree that the vast majority of butterfly species in North America are beautiful to look at, but one of my favorites is the very attractive Pipevine Swallowtail. They are jet black overall, and the hind wings of the males are marked with a spectacular blue iridescence. The iridescence is even more brilliant in the bright sunlight. Some people even call them blue swallowtails.
Females are no less beautiful than the males, but the blue iridescence on their hind wings is a little duller. The underside of the hind wings of both sexes is marked by more blue iridescence, along with several distinctive bright orange spots. These unique swallowtail butterflies are large, too, with a wingspan of nearly five inches.
Pipevine swallowtails get their unusual name from the fact that they lay their eggs on a variety of pipevine plants in the Aristolochia family. These include pipevine, woolly Dutchman’s pipe, Texas Dutchman’s pipe and Virginia snakeroot, just to name a few. The caterpillars that hatch and eat the leaves of these plants ingest a type of acid that makes them taste terrible to predators like birds.
Adult pipevine swallowtails retain their acidic bad taste from their days as a caterpillar, but they no longer eat bitter pipevine plants. Instead, they feed on the nectar of a variety of flowers – mostly flowers that are orange, pink or purple. Some of their favorites include thistle, milkweed, butterfly bush, ironweed and phlox. They will visit other flowers, too.
Some other butterflies imitate the color pattern of pipevine swallowtails with the hope that hungry birds will mistake them for the pipevine variety and shun them, too. After all, who wants to eat something that tastes bad? Some of those butterfly species that mimic the pipevine swallowtail include the spicebush swallowtail, the red‑spotted purple, female black swallowtails and the dark morph of the female tiger swallowtail.
If you create a butterfly garden and plant the right flowers, you just might attract some of these beauties!
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