Hot. July 2023 was hot, hot, hot. It is perfectly sane and respectable to just stay indoors in Louisiana in a normal July, and July 2023 was hotter than most. But you can’t see or count butterflies indoors, so…. a bunch of the incurable fortify themselves with bottles of water, field hats, and energy snacks, and out they go.

July 31, 2022 – Knowing which flowers to plant is hugely helpful if you want to attract butterflies to your home, and Charles Allen wrote a book about it!* So counting butterflies at Allen Acres is great fun. Beauties like this Eastern Giant Swallowtail (Heraclides cresphontes) are a fairly regular sight. Allen Acres is a B&B on 26 acres of woods and naturalistic gardens on Highway 399 just south of Pitkin, La. Those of us with a passion for all things natural sometimes refer to it as “Disney World for naturalists”! I do my best to spend a couple days there several times a year.

July 1, 2023 – A hot, hot day in a hot, hot month, and I have arranged for the first ever butterfly count at Black Bayou Lake NWR. So out we went. By mid-afternoon, we’d pretty much had enough and were headed back toward air-conditioned vehicles to take us back to the air-conditioned headquarters to tally our count and refresh ourselves. Perhaps that is why I almost walked past this amazing work of art, architecture, and life without seeing it, even though it hung at eye-level in a small shrub. Of course, it was also well-shrouded by the leaves of the shrub, but a breeze parted them at just the right moment. It is most likely the nest of a Baltimore Oriole (Icterus galbula) or an Orchard Oriole (Icterus spurius). But at that moment I felt like I had just been given a glimpse of the very spirit of life.

*Gardening for Butterflies & Moths (2022), by Dr. Charles M. Allen.