Nature Notes--Saturday Morning's Mitzvah

Time and experience in the blogosphere have taught me that Viceroy butterflies can easily be distinguished from Monarchs, if you know what to look for. Michelle of Ramblingwoods.com helped me identify a butterfly I found last year in Illinois. She directed me to note the difference in markings and provided a link to an appropriate identification site. You might even say she "mitzvahed" me into the mysteries of butterflies. I'm not trying to be irreverant here. I've been spending the past few weeks delving into some even more profound mysteries while preparing some unusual (eclectic?) studies for a small group that's meeting at our home this month. When someone gives me an assignment (mitzvah?), I tend to devote a lot of time and effort toward completing it, sometimes to the exclusion of other activities like blogging. This past week King David's mischief with Bathsheba commanded my undivided attention.

Nevertheless, I awoke early this morning, determined to gather some images from the garden and post about them. Not even those heavy legs I've posted about before could deter me from my mission. Look at the treasure I found! Tina of In the Garden handed me some orange Cosmos seeds last fall when we met in New Harmony, Indiana, which I dutifully planted this spring about three meters from where these plants sprouted. Since the garden slopes down from here, I'm thinking it must have been ants--or a clumsy gardener with ridges on her soles--that carried the seeds uphill to this germination point.

My early morning walk revealed an immature but determined visitor on one of our two pink grapefruit trees. From the looks of it (at first glance it resembles bird poo), it could either be the caterpillar form of the Viceroy butterfly, which can have more than two generations in the South, or perhaps of some type of Swallowtail (Papilio) species. Its unremitting desire to erect a consumer's temple at the site of my hopes for future citrus may have signed and sealed its death warrant. It won't even be allowed to carry it to the front lines like Uriah the Hittite did.

Even if I hadn't determined its fate, this unusual red bug I found a few days earlier nearby would have dispatched it without a shred of regret.

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Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow's springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Spring and Fall (to a young child)," 1880--

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Why did I not remember this song earlier? It was one of my dad's favorites.