Different Is the Norm

Two new visitors to the garden drank up nectar together, and a mad dash for the camera was the human reaction… because these visitors were SO COOL.

First a large black swallowtail, but NOT an actual Black Swallowtail — this is the black morph of the female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, the first I’d ever seen.

If you look closely at the forewings, you can see a shadow of the stripes that are so familiar in the yellow morph of the Eastern Tiger.

Her proboscis kept reminding me of Gonzo the Great, one of my favorite Muppets.

A close-up reveals that the blue color is a sprinkling of little dots.

Zoooooom. What was that yellow and black creature zipping by? Not a bumblebee, no no. And nope, not a hummgbird. And most definitely not a butterfly. It was a Snowberry Clearwing Moth, a hummingbird moth. So beautiful and fun to watch. Just strangely named, given that it exists here in central Texas, where snow is not the norm. Apparently it was named because it likes snowberries. Go figure.

And while it can hover and zoom like a hummingbird, it does behave a little differently and rests its front legs on a bloom while drinking nectar. Its wings never seem to stop — their clear centers make them very hard to see sometimes.

See its rolled-up proboscis in the photo below? I didn’t notice it until I looked at the photos, that’s how fast the big moth zipped about. The moth extends it out super fast to suck up the nectar, then rolls it right back up again for easy travel. 

The Snowberry Clearwing’s caterpillar form is a hornworm, related to those infamous tomato plant munchers, but these caterpillars prefer honeysuckle (including, of course, snowberries), viburnum, cherry, and plum. Works for me.

And for them, apparently.