About a week ago, as I was walking past my rural Missouri butterfly garden, I noticed a Black Swallowtail that was busy laying eggs on a parsley plant (host plant for these beautiful butterflies). Yesterday, I closely inspected the plant to see if I could find the eggs … voila, I found about a dozen eggs scattered about on the parsley plant:
And a closer look found one freshly-hatched Black Swallowtail caterpillar:
After capturing these images, I moved about half the eggs to my mesh butterfly garden, inside the house. Why? Well, a couple of reasons. First, to prevent all of them from being picked off the plant by birds visiting the garden. Second, I am looking forward to monitoring the eggs (and a single, large caterpillar I also found) and photographing the life cycle stages of the Black Swallowtail. Upon transitioning to adult butterflies, they will be returned to my butterfly garden so they can continue their life journey.
Photographic Equipment Used:
- Canon 5D Mark III body
- Canon 180mm macro lens
- Bogen 3221 tripod with ballhead
- ISO 200
- Aperture f/3.5
- Shutter 1/45 sec. (top 2 photos), and 1/10 sec. (bottom photo)