TigerHawk

TigerHawk (ti*ger*hawk): n. 1. The title of this blog and the nom de plume of its founding blogger; 2. A deep bow to the Princeton Tigers and the Iowa Hawkeyes; 3. The nickname for Iowa's Hawkeye logo. Posts include thoughts of the day on international affairs, politics, things that strike us as hilarious and personal observations. The opinions we express are our own, and not those of each other, our employers, our relatives, our dead ancestors, or unrelated people of similar ethnicity.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Flora and fauna: Virginia blue bells, lilacs, and flutterbys

By TigerHawk at 4/12/2010 12:40:00 PM

We took a morning walk through the woods, and saw a lot of flowers and butterflys. We're off to Appomattox for some history and lunch, but not before leaving you with the best of the bunch.

Caught this guy mid-flight:

Of course, professional and amateur entomologists can contribute by identifying these species in the comments.

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9 Comments:

By Anonymous, at Mon Apr 12, 01:56:00 PM:

Do Tiger Swallowtails qualify as the tiger photo of the day?

By Boludo Tejano, at Mon Apr 12, 01:57:00 PM:

Excellent photos. I will add my taxonomic expertise and identify one of the species as the Yellow and Black species of the genus nullus.
Class: Caesarium.

By Edward Lunny, at Mon Apr 12, 04:12:00 PM:

Do you manipulate the images , beyond sizing for these pages, before posting them ? The color saturation and detail level is admirable on my lcd. An lcd that hasn't been calibrated beyond hooking them there wire thingies to those sockety thingies on the back of that there box thingy sitting on the floor. Or are those fuscia azaleas really white and my denial about my, ahem, eyesight accuracy is deeper than I'm willing to admit ?

By TigerHawk, at Mon Apr 12, 04:45:00 PM:

No image manipulation -- shoot, dump, upload, post. That's it.

By rcw, at Mon Apr 12, 05:13:00 PM:

Beautiful photos, TH!! Spring is clearly much further along in your neck of the woods than it is in Maine...

thanks for the preview.

By Edward Lunny, at Mon Apr 12, 05:54:00 PM:

" No image manipulation " Excellent, my delusions about my age related vision decline is safe for another day or so. Wonderful photos by the way. Ah, the wonders of modern technology....when they don't need immediate firmware or software upgrades that is.

By Ed, at Tue Apr 13, 09:33:00 AM:

I believe the first anonymous commenter was quite right. These butterflies are Tiger Swallowtails.

The black ones are always female, the yellow can be male or female.

By Anonymous, at Tue Apr 13, 01:37:00 PM:

Appomattox? Virginia is a beautiful place in the spring.

Retread

By Tim, at Tue Apr 13, 06:54:00 PM:

These are indeed tiger swallowtails. They are the state butterfly of Virginia and several other states.