Cloudless Sulphur (Phoebis sennae) caterpillar
Yesterday I bailed from work before lunch because I wasn’t feeling well. At some point I knew I wasn’t going to be able to power through it and hope I’d feel better. I came home and spent a few hours watching tv, taking a nap, and slurping some soup. Around 3pm I walked outside for a few minutes to get some fresh air and to enjoy the sun; it was far too nice of a day to be cooped up inside as I had been. I grabbed my camera and decided to go for a walk around the garden for a few minutes. I was almost done and heading back to the monarch tent went I stopped to admire the Senna corymbosa. The flowers were slowly fading and seedpods had begun forming. And then my eye caught something I hadn’t seen out there before—a new caterpillar for the garden! I went inside and flipped through my caterpillar book. I hadn’t really studied the caterpillar but I had narrowed it down to a cloudless sulphur or an orange barred sulphur. Once I opened my photos up to look a little closer and compare to Google Images it was evident it was a cloudless sulphur! I had been noticing a lot more sulphurs around here but I never really identify which ones because they are such flightly butterflies and don’t sit still long enough for one to really inspect them. I’m glad to know that they have decided to start using my senna to start laying eggs! Since I wasn’t feeling well I didn’t really inspect the entire plant to see if there were more but I suspect there may be! Now I will be paying attention to see if I can find when it decides to pupate!
Lucky find!
3 Comments
chel
SO! BEAUTIFUL!!!! *swooning*
we only have a handful of plants left inside the lanai (went from 100 to maybe 15 or 20, and they are all small- all the vines had to be ripped down), and no caterpillars or butterflies. A lot of our plants perished during the storm, and Tom gave the rest to our landscape guy, who helped us so much during the hurricane and is getting his landscaping business going.
Tom has decided to narrow down his on-the-lanai butterfly raising to Zebras, Julias, Frits, and Swallowtails- all butterflies that thrived inside the lanai- so we’re going to container garden exclusively for those specific ones inside the lanai. Outside the lanai, we lost a bunch of landscape plants during the storm, so we are going to slowly fill in those spaces around the outside of the house with host and nectar plants for all butterflies. Maybe we’ll finally get the butterfly garden we’ve wanted. But it’s not an inexpensive process, so it’s going to go slow.
Also, we need our lanai to be screened in again before we can start again with the butterflies- I think there’s only one screen that didn’t get torn or completely blown away during Irma. I don’t think anyone’s screens survived here. Hopefully we’ll have new screens so so we can get back to butterflies- I miss them so much.
These photos made my day.
I hope you are feeling better! *hugs*
Thank you for sharing your garden- I’ve missed ours *so* much. It’s so boring out there now.
Moosie
I love seeing the new caterpillars!
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