Wildlife Wednesday June 2016

Wildlife in the garden during May brought a couple of special butterfly sightings and a few other amusing wildlife antics.  Wildlife Wednesday hosted by Tina at "My Gardener Says..." presents bloggers an opportunity to share wildlife in the garden on the first Wednesday of each month.

Butterfly identification can be challenging as with this striking white butterfly.  At first I thought it was a Cabbage White Butterfly, but it lacked the dark edge on the forewing and has distinctive bands instead of spots.  After searching I'm going with male Checkered White Butterfly (Pontia protodice) which is so much better since Cabbage White Butterflies are not native.  Interestingly, they both use members of the cabbage and mustard family as host plants.  I could not find any information to confirm whether these butterflies consume the invasive weed Rapistrum rugosum or Bastard Cabbage which has been decimating our native wildflower fields.

Wildlife Wednesday July 2014

Over the nearly three years I've been blogging I've enjoyed sharing some of the wildlife visitors to my garden under the heading "Garden Visitors" and now I have even more reason to post these photos.  Tina at "My Gardener Says.." has started a new meme as a way of sharing the wildlife we encounter in the garden and she's invited garden bloggers to participate on the first Wednesday of each month.  I'll join in as often as I can starting off with a few of our wildlife visitors this year.

We have to watch our step in the gardens lately since these little toads, barely an inch long, are running rampant for the first time in years.  I think that's due to several weeks of regular rainfall which has left small pools of water in the creek.  They are probably Texas Toads and will provide a natural pest control service the rest of the summer by eating the mosquitoes which are resulting from all this rain.  With the local bat population decimated, this is a positive development.