Eastern Tiger Swallowtails........

As a blogger one sees things that need to be shared. When I am out working in the garden I see lots of things that I could take photos of to share.  It always happens that the thing that is outstanding to share is at the time when a camera is not in my hands.  There were three of these butterflies at once in the coneflower patch.  I went to get the camera thinking that they would not be there when I returned.  Well as you can see two of them were still there, one had left,  and these two were not tame like the other swallowtail that hangs around all the time.  I was able to snap two shots and then they were gone.

I hate to blog false facts and sometimes I go back in an old blog and just erase a whole paragraph if I think that I was wrong, confused or even not sure of what I was talking about on that subject. The swallowtail apparently has various colorings on their wings.  The plain one that I shoot a lot of pictures of daily is a male butterfly.  These two in the above photo have that great blue coloring on them at the base of their two inside wings.  I am thinking that they are female butterflies.

 Another butterfly that I took the other day apparently was also a swallowtail but it must have been a younger one.  I read a lot of things about them and some of the writings contradict themselves.  Anyway, I am going to throw all of the butterflies in the shape of a swallowtail to be just that.  There are side markings that helps us to know the sex of them.  I also found out that the two fast growing poplar trees that sits next to the coneflowers are a favorite place for them to lay eggs. One other discovery is that sometimes the females can have a lot of brown on their inside wings.If they keep coming back maybe I can get them all identified just like a birdwatcher does.