Painted Ladies

We were in Albury last weekend and when you're in Albury you drive up Monument Hill to view the view. And the monument itself is worth looking at as well. It was built in the 1920s to commemorate the WW1 soldiers and has an art deco style.

Dean St, Albury (and beyond), viewed from Monument Hill.

The memorial on Monument Hill

But what really caught my eye was butterflies. I was amazed to see about six or eight Australian Painted Ladies Vanessa kershaw, all males, flying rapidly and low over the vegetation and basking in the sun. There were probably many more because the memorial is in a bushland reserve and we only saw a very small section of it. I presume the butterflies were hilltopping, establishing territories, but I must admit I hadn't expected to see any in mid-August. My first butterflies for the season.

Australian Painted Lady (actually a male), Monument Hill, Albury

Restless visitors

A long weekend, a few quiet days on our farm at Homerton - apart from the welcome noise of a couple of young grandsons.

The noisiest bird in the house paddock is a Restless Flycatcher. I'm very fond of these birds' distinctive calls and their sleek lines, and am pleased that they still call our farm home. Their numbers generally appear to be dropping.

It's been a warm and humid day today, with a storm expected this evening, and large numbers of swifts are flying over the paddocks, both Fork-tailed and White-throated. I haven't seen them in such numbers for a long time. I tried following a few with the binoculars to get an idea of ratio but they were moving too 'swiftly'. All I can say is that the impression I got was that the Fork-tails were in the majority.

Our council complied with our request to grade the track that runs up the side of our property, which is good. But... the grader driver hasn't been to a training class on the value of roadside vegetation, which is bad. I don't think too much damage has been done - time will tell - but the formation of this particular drainage line has pushed a young tree to one side and right onto 'my' Diuris patch. I'll have to wait until spring to see if damage has been done here.

Also flying this week are numerous female Common Brown butterflies and quite a few Shouldered Browns Heteronympha penelope. All are flying low over the grassy woodland areas at the edge of the closed bush. Here's one male Shouldered Brown that I managed to photograph ...

... and a female Common Brown that almost appears to be laying eggs.

Vegie garden wildlfe

Yesterday I mentioned a skipper butterfly that 'got away' - I couldn't get a photo. Today I managed to get photos good enough to get a positive ID. And it turned out to be a species that I've found in my garden, in other summers, on grevilleas and lomandra. Today it was on garlic chive flowers, grass and tomatoes. It's a relatively common skipper species Greenish Grass-dart Ocybadistes walkeri.

And this little bee was on the garlic chive flowers as well. It's a resin bee Megachile leucopyga. On the BrisbaneInsects webpage it's called Gold-barred Resin Bee. Apparently they build nests in holes of hardwood timber, including man-made drilled holes. The entrance is usually sealed with a solid resin plug. They provision their brood with pollen and nectar.

Marbled Xenica

Many Common Brown males fly up from the grassy understory as I walk through the bush, and occasionally the smaller and darker Marbled Xenicas, also males (below). They perch on leaf mulch or exposed soil.

Pelicans and butterflies

It was a muggy and warm day today, with big black clouds blocking the sun and thunder rumbling in the distance. It was all talk though, because there were only a few drops of rain.

At one stage I went to find my binoculars to have a look at a flock of about 30 pelicans circling low in a thermal over my house. Never seen that here before.

And then I got distracted by the hundreds of butterflies fluttering at very high levels. Never seen that before either. They were all dark and flying randomly (i.e. not all flying in the one direction). As my garden has been populated by numbers of male Common Browns in the last week or so I'm assuming the high-flying butterflies were the same species.

Harvey Street

It was a beautiful morning and I was in Anglesea with some spare time. Perfect. The woodland off Harvey Street seemed like a good option and it proved to be a good choice.

The austrostipas, poas and austrodanthonias were flowering and waving in the slight breeze and as always look spectacular when backlit. There were a few plants flowering (pimeleas, peas, lomandras, an orchid or two, fringe-lilies, daisies and even a few violets), there were a few insects on the shrubs (dragonflies, damselflies, wasps, flies, ants, bees, moths and butterflies), there were one or two birds calling (but as it was midday I wasn't expecting too many) and I had the bush track all to myself. It was a delightful hour.

Thysanotus tuberosus subsp. tuberosus, Common Fringe Lily

Caladenia tentaculata Mantis Orchid

Spider

Day-flying moth. Family Crambidae, Corynophora lativittalis. Thanks MH.

Male Common Brown Heteronympha merope

Varied Sedge-skipper Hesperilla donnysa.

Metallic Jewel (Shield) Bug Scutiphora pedicellata

PS I'll update the IDs when I've done some homework. Any ideas?

Update: All sorted now. Thanks CT for help on the bug, MH for the moth and VWD and DM for the sedge-skipper butterfly.

Darting Grass-darts

I saw a pair of tiny butterflies in my garden today and went inside to get my camera hoping they'd still be there when I got back. I needn't have worried because they were flying around and settling on low shrubs in the sunshine. Getting a focus on them was another matter. If one flew so did the other. How do they communicate when they're more than a metre apart?

They're Greenish Grass-darts Ocybadistes walkeri, beautiful little creatures. Note that they hold one pair of wings in a vertical position.

Buffalo butterfly

In one area on top of Mt Buffalo I found Two-brand Grass-skippers Anisynta dominula. Braby says 'adults fly close to the ground in open sunny areas, preferring moist, sheltered, gently sloping grassy gullies and slopes; they frequently feed from flowers of daisies', and that's exactly where they were. The top two photos are of a female, and the bottom one is a male. Braby also says they appear from mid-February in Victoria so maybe they're flying early because of climate change.

Small delights

The Great Otway National Park is big, very big, and diverse. Last weekend we explored some of the wet forest areas. These are some of the small beetles we saw. The first is a Scarab beetle, the Eucalyptus Chafer Xylonichus eucalypti. I don't know identity of the other two as yet. The butterfly is a Forest Brown Argynnina cryila.

Update: The second beetle is a darkling beetle Lepispilus rotundicollis, the red and black insect is a Lycid beetle.

Trapped

As we stood at the lookout at 1770, imagining the captain sailing around the headland in 1770 to drop anchor, I noticed a lovely butterfly trapped in a cobweb. It must have just happened because it was fluttering madly trying to escape. I managed to get top and bottom photos.

Queensland butterflies

Some of the butterflies I've seen in Conway National Park, Airlie Beach. No idea what they are - I left my books at home.

Fellow campers

We settled ourselves into a spot in a caravan park at Airlee Beach for a couple of weeks. Two Bush-stone-curlews standing very still under a tree - maybe under the impression that we couldn’t see them - watched us very carefully as we set up our van. They growled if we got too close. I didn’t know stone-curlews do that.

We relaxed into our camp chairs ... and saw a big blue butterfly land in a shrub several metres away. That was the end of relaxing.

It was a male Common Eggfly Butterfly Hypolimnas bolina nerina (known in New Zealand as the Blue Moon Butterfly). Apparently each male defends a territory about 30-40 metres apart and usually rests on a leaf one or two metres above the ground. This particular butterfly was not very active so I was able to get a reasonable photo.

Lunch time

Time for a coffee stop, keep a lookout for a likely spot, one with natural vegetation, shelter from wind or shade (whichever applies), level, accessible. There's one. Pull over and fill the kettle, wander around with the camera and binoculars while waiting for kettle to boil.

Our choice of a spot south of Coonamble was a gem. Really it was just an entrance to a station - mailbox (an old fridge) and a gate with the station name attached, but the wide road had lots of trees. The mistletoe was flowering and the trees had hollows and fallen timber underneath, only one car travelled alone the dirt road while we were there, a flat horizon with the blue Warrumbungles off into the distance to the south, the sun was shining and birds were flying from tree to tree and calling.

The grasshoppers were jumping around and in the roly-poly, and I found one little spider in amongst the prickles holding firmly to a little blue butterfly. It must have thought it was lunch time as well.

A berry pretty meadow

Really we had stopped at the berry farm near Swansea for pancakes but I got a bit distracted by the numerous butterflies and damselflies on the garden flowers. The brilliant blue damselflies were too quick for me and my camera but I managed to 'capture' one or two of the Meadow Argus butterflies.

An admiral

To quote from my Braby*, the Yellow Admiral butterflies Vanessa itea 'fly rapidly and frequently settle, with head directed downwards and wings outspread or closed, on leaves or tree-trunks'. Which is exactly what the one I photographed is doing. I think this is a female.
Aren't reference books great?

*The Complete Field Guide to Butterflies of Australia, Michael F Braby

When a butterfly is a moth

What was it? I searched through my butterfly references in vain, looking for a black and white butterfly with orange tufts on its legs and abdomen. Then the penny finally dropped. I looked in the moth references instead and there it was. The Grapevine Moth Phalaenoides glycinae was flying around and feeding on the blossom of a Melaleuca.

Apparently it's a common day-flying moth but I don't remember seeing one before. There aren't any grapevines within cooee either but as it also breeds on guinea-flowers and willow herbs and both of those plants are in the bush nearby I'm supposing it was 'at home'.

The moth was moving fairly quickly around the blossom and the first photo is blurred but I'm including it because it shows the remarkable orange tufts. Now why would a moth want to evolve that colouring?

And on one of my bush rambles (on a day that wasn't enervatingly hot) this butterfly sat still on a bracken frond long enough for me to grab a couple of photos. It's a female Common Brown. The larva feed on Tussock Grass and Kangaroo Grass.