A hike and a lesson.

K and I went on a butterfly hike and ran into the White Pine forest.

So pretty!

Your lesson for the day- what is this butterfly? (I'll say that this was a distance away, so it isn't real crisp.)  Can you see the semi-circle line on the wings?  That line is what will tell you that it is not . . .

. . . a monarch.  (A better picture of a monarch is on the blog header.) Hubs taught me to remember that a viceroy smiles back at you.  Besides, this monarch is on milkweed and the look-a-like is definitely not.  (Not that monarchs exclusively stay on milkweed.  It is their host plant, though.) Viceroys are often identified as a monarch and a monarch they are not.

Chicory.  Oh how I want some of this for my yard.  Yes, it is the stuff that grows along the roadside.

While we were hiking, I looked down a long mowed path and there were what looked like two huge bowling pins looking back at me.  TURKEYS!  One ducked into the woods before the camera snapped the picture.

K carefully pulling a butterfly from the net.

An orange sulfur.  K loved the pink antennae.

A red spotted purple in our backyard.  It's an edge-of-forest butterfly and we are not edge-of-forest.  Looks like he was snacked upon.

Another snacking victim.  A fully tail-less tiger swallowtail.

Shhh!  They'll never see me here.

A slice of butterfly!

This bad boy is going to go into the black bean nacho burgers I'm about to make.

K asked that I wear it as a mustache.  :)

Have a great weekend!