Wildlife Watching Wednesday: The Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly
By: Tom Berg
If you’ve seen a large yellow butterfly in your yard or garden this summer, chances are good that it was a tiger swallowtail butterfly. Tiger swallowtails are one of the easiest butterflies to identify in the eastern United States since they are bright yellow with very distinct black “tiger stripes” on their forewings. Females have a band of bright blue on their hind wings. They are large butterflies, often having wingspans of five inches or more. They are called swallowtails because they have long, thin “tails” on their hind wings that resemble the pointed tails of barn swallows.
Adult tiger swallowtails live wherever there are trees, and they can be seen flying across fields, river bottoms, lakeshores, parks and gardens. These beautiful butterflies feed on a wide variety of flowers, including lilac, cone flowers, butterfly bush, daisies and many others. They lay their eggs on trees like ash, poplar, black cherry, choke cherry, tulip tree, cottonwood and others.
It takes about four weeks for an egg to hatch into a caterpillar and then develop into an adult butterfly. The caterpillars are brown and white and camouflaged to look like bird droppings when they are young, but before pupating and becoming a butterfly they turn green and develop eyespots to resemble a snake. This helps protect them from birds and other predators. There are usually two broods produced in northern states and often three in the south and in Mexico.
Male tiger swallowtails can sometimes be seen “puddling”, where large groups of them congregate around the muddy edges of puddles or on damp sand or gravel to extract salts and other minerals from the ground. This is a great time to see several (or even dozens) of these bright butterflies up close and personal!
Tiger swallowtails are not beautiful and only easy to identify, they are very popular with people, too. Tiger swallowtails are the official state butterfly of Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, and North and South Carolina. They are also the state insect of Virginia. We can see why!
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