Zooming – August 2025

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All the images I selected for this month’s zooming post were from places around Springfield MO and Berryville AR. The subjects were:

  • Juvenile birds (cardinal and robin) and an adult hummingbird

  • Flowers and plants (pokeweed, naked lady lilies, zinnias, crape myrtle, cone flowers, daylily)

  • Caves (Cosmic and Onyx)

  • Caterpillars (spicebush swallowtail and zebra swallowtail)

  • Butterflies and moths (spicebush swallowtail, red spotted purple, cecropia moth, luna moth

  • Juvenile racoon

  • Edge of a golf course scene

The picture of the juvenile robin was taken through a window and with camera settings that gave it a hazy look to capture the ‘feel’ of the day – it was a very humid August day! The one of a bench looking out onto a golf course was an attempt to capture the morning mood as we prepared to leave our Berryville hotel; it was a warm, sunny morning…full of bird songs…a good beginning of the day.

Enjoy the August 2021 slide show!

Roston Native Butterfly House – July 2025

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My shifts at the Roston Native Butterfly House were hotter in July – even though all of them were for the 10-12:30 shift. The high points of the month involved caterpillars.

Two that were new-to-me were the caterpillars for the red spotted purple butterfly (on willow) and the Atala butterfly (on cycad).

At the beginning of one of my shifts, I was cleaning the caterpillar frass from the very wet display table and got a big surprise when I flipped the lid on the trash to throw away a messy paper towel and discovered a very large cecropia moth caterpillar on some black cherry leaves that just happened to be in the trash. I quickly scooped the leaves and caterpillar up and put them back with the other cecropia caterpillars…..and the caterpillar began wondering around the table. My assumption is that sometime during the night it wandered off the table and fell into the trash. We eventually put it in the zippered cage so that its walkabout could be somewhat contained! It was probably large enough to be ready to make its cocoon.

I enjoy photographing things in the butterfly house whenever there are few or no visitors there! The cecropia caterpillars in the house toward the end of the month were ones that were raised with my luna caterpillars on sweet gum, and they rejected a shift to black cherry leaves when they got to the butterfly house….so now the sweet gum vase has a mix of luna and cecropia caterpillars.