These photos are the result of a walk around my suburban Townsville garden in peak insect season, a couple of weeks after the very-Wet season ended.
Peak insect season in my garden
Tag: butterfly
Bees and butterflies
This time of year is good for all our invertebrate friends. It’s warm and wet, and everything is green and growing. Here are a few recent bees and butterflies from my garden.
Living well in the cemetery
It’s well over six months after my first exploration of the Townsville cemetery in Belgian Gardens. On this recent return visit I walked right around it. That gave me plenty of time to think about it as a wildlife habitat; a good walk, too, since the cemetery is about 1.5 km long.
Birdwings in winter
The weather has been so beautiful recently that sitting indoors to write blog posts is less appealing than wandering outside, with or without a camera.
Cairns Birdwing butterflies, Ornithoptera euphorion, are abundant here (because we grow their food plant) and always beautiful but we don’t often get a photo showing the upper wings of the males because they always (well, 99.99% of the time) shut their wings together while resting. Why? If they didn’t, they might as well be shouting, “Eat me!” to the birds. (Ulysses Swallowtails are the same, only more so. So are many other butterflies – bright in flight, camouflaged at rest.)
So here’s one I caught while he was hovering to feed, and again while resting.
Many Peaks trail revisited
I walked the Many Peaks trail again last weekend, almost exactly a year after my previous visit. This time, walking with friends, I didn’t stop so often to look at little wildlife, but we still took about five hours for the twelve kilometres or so. That seems, in fact, to be a reasonable minimum time for the route for anyone who wants to enjoy it.
The Wet is well over but there is still open water. The water birds, however, still have other options and are not in great numbers on the Common. That said, we did see Drongo, Magpie Geese, Egret, Peaceful Dove, Honeyeaters, Rainbow Bee-eater, hawk (probably Black Kite), Plovers, Scrub Turkey and other species.
The Tawny Coster is now so well established that it was one of the commonest butterflies but there were plenty of the usual Swamp Tigers, Blue Tigers, Crows (both Common and Brown) and others.
