The Tiger Swallowtail butterfly

Springtime is such a glorious time of the year. Spring’s arrival brings with it such things as beautiful flowers, singing birds, and delicate butterflies for each of us to watch and enjoy.  The first butterfly you see, however, may not be a butterfly. The small white flitting butterfly like one you see in early spring is not a butterfly at all. It is a White Cabbage moth. They are not, as one may think, a pest. They actually are more interested in the nectars they can find. Cabbage root maggots are the critters that do damage to cabbage and broccoli starts. The most commonly seen butterfly we see here is the yellow, sometimes dark colored, Tiger Swallowtail butterfly.

The Tiger Swallowtail butterfly gets the first part of its name from the black stripes on its yellow wings and the second part from its tail that looks long and like the pointed tail of birds called swallows.  This is a common butterfly. Its wingspan can be as much as 6 1/2” wide. The male will not have any blue on his hind wing.  Only the females have this blue and only the female Tiger Swallowtail can be dark (almost black).  On these dark ones the shadow of tiger stripes can still be faintly seen.  Butterflies, like moths, undergo complete metamorphosis - they go through four different life stages.

A butterfly starts its life as an egg.  The larva, its second stage (a caterpillar) hatches from the egg that its mother laid on tree leaves. The eggs could be on Lilac, aspen, birch, choke cherry and a few other trees whose leaves are the food for the caterpillar. Before the caterpillar eats the leaves it eats its own egg case. The newly hatched caterpillar is brown and white, and for its protection, it looks like bird droppings. As it grows, the caterpillar molts many times.  As it loses its old skin, the new skin starts to turn green.  The green caterpillar still has protection because it has large yellow eyespots that have black dots that look like pupils.  These huge eyes give it the appearance of being a snake, which is enough to scare most predators away.  The caterpillar lives in a nest it makes by folding a leaf and securing it with silk. It grows to be about two inches long before it pupates.

The caterpillar turns into its third stage, a pupa, (a chrysalis). It is in a case resting. At this time it does not eat or drink.  The caterpillar becomes a pupa by attaching itself to a twig with a sling-like silk rope. The skin on its back splits open falls off and reveals the chrysalis. After a few weeks it transforms in the chrysalis into its fourth stage, a butterfly.  The butterflies begin to have their own broods. Each butterfly will have two to three broods. They have two broods in the North and three in the southern portion of their habitat.

It takes about a month to go from egg to butterfly. If the chrysalis is formed in the late fall, it will hibernate over the winter and emerge as a butterfly the following spring.  There is no growth in its last stage, but the butterfly will sip nectar.  Butterflies can only sip liquid food by using their long proboscis, which is a long tongue. This tongue uncoils to sip food, and it coils back up into a spiral when it is not in use.

The Tiger Swallowtail butterfly can be seen in the woods, in your backyards, and even in big cities. It is found in Eastern USA and Canada.  The Tiger Swallowtail can often be seen on a plant with its wings fully spread.  They are especially fond of resting like this when the sun is out.  The adults are diurnal (meaning they are active during the day).  The Tiger Swallowtail is the state butterfly for Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia. The state butterfly for New York is the Red Spotted Purple butterfly also known as the White Admiral butterfly.

Butterflies play an important role in the environment. They maintain the balance of nature and health of the living world. They pollinate wild plants and our crops.  Some plants are only pollinated by certain types of butterflies. They are very fragile, and because of this they are great indicators of ecological changes.  Butterflies are also a valuable source of food for songbirds. There is also the theory that came in the early sixties from the work by Edward Lorenze that is known as the “Butterfly Effect”.  It states that the flap of a butterfly’s wing in one country could possibly change the weather in another by creating small changes in the atmosphere.