Mike in the Wild

Bugs are something to reliably count on seeing every summer evening in Prescott, at least for now.  Luckily they're usually not the annoying ones: houseflies besetting your face, mosquitoes biting your ankles.  Instead more colorful, less hyperactive nocturnal insects creep out of the shadows.   When the porch lights switch on after twilight, it only takes an hour or so before moths appear on the scene.  These lepidopterans share a large family with skippers and butterflies, varieties that I mostly see during the daylight hours.  The nocturnal moths are just as attracted to my home's lights during colder temperatures in the fall and spring.  While many are colorful, it's their wide variation in size that's most notable, ranging from a tiny couple millimeters to almost the width of a hand when the polyphemus moth pays an infrequent visit. If monsoon rains have drenched the landscape, June bugs - despite the name, it's usually July when they start sh...

You can't spend any time outdoors birding without running into butterflies.  While easy to spot, and even approach, getting one to stay still for a good photograph presents a rewarding challenge. Enthusiastically learning about birds and their many species, I've not made a similar effort with butterflies.  One reason for that is the sheer number of varieties that exist.  While the animal class of birds or aves include almost 10,000 species worldwide - much lower in Arizona - butterflies are in a single order of the insect class that include closer to 200,000 species!  This order is  lepidoptera , and includes several families of insects like butterflies along with their cousins the moths and skimmers. While fun to see and photograph, I'll only occasionally put the time into researching them.  Here are several Arizona species I've been able to meet in the last year.  Some are not identified - I'll leave that to my  lepidopterist friends! P...