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Door To Nature

A Mourning Cloak butterfly on Roy Lukes’ finger.

 

One of the most pleasant sights in nature we’ve had so far this year was the Mourning Cloak Butterfly seen by Charlotte on Friday, March 20, 2015, with the outdoor temperature up to 52 degrees F. We were near our mailbox at the road when suddenly it appeared “out of nowhere” flying merrily on its way. Obviously it had wintered as an adult, as is the case for this species, along with the Question Mark and the Comma Butterflies.

The life span of the Mourning Cloak is about 10 months, so, assuming that it had hatched last August, the one seen this past March 20 has four or five months in which to find a mate, breed, lay eggs and die. Come spring each year, I’m very eager to see my first butterfly of the year, which in most years is the Mourning Cloak.

A good guess is that the one we saw recently had spent the winter having crawled into an opening of a wood pile, perhaps the stack of stove wood in our front yard, or it may have found shelter in the culvert pipe under the start of our driveway. There is no doubt that the point of greatest interest to the one we saw was food.

Its nourishment at this time of the year most likely will be tree sap from an American Elm, Sugar Maple, Eastern Cottonwood, either the Small-toothed or the Large-toothed Aspen, or even the Paper Birch. Later this spring, as various plants come into bloom, they will feed quite frequently on the nectar of their blossoms.

The long-lived Mourning Cloak is a member of the strong-winged “brush foot” tribe. It is truly amazing that this dainty little butterfly can crawl into a woodpile or behind a loose piece of tree bark and spend the entire winter without the cell walls of this outwardly fragile creature bursting.

It has been determined that a glycerol-like substance is produced within its body, similar in composition to the antifreeze fluid in the radiator of your car, which prevents their bodies from freezing solid.  

One of our favorite experiences with this species occurred in late 1983. A call from Judy Lhost, living near Sister Bay, described a dark butterfly having cream-colored wing edges that mysteriously appeared in her house on Dec. 31. Her description fit the Mourning Cloak perfectly.

The answer to the mystery was quickly solved when Charlotte asked Judy if she was bringing firewood into the house, and her answer was, “yes.” Obviously the large dark butterfly had chosen Judy’s outdoor woodpile in which to spend the winter hibernating.

These “frail children of the air” emerge from their chrysalises from late summer to early fall and, along with other hardy butterflies, including, for example, the Anglewings, Compton Tortoise-shells, Red Admirals and Painted Ladies, crawl under a loose piece of bark, or in Judy’s case, deep inside a wood pile where they miraculously withstand sub-zero temperatures.

I have fond memories of some boyhood Sunday mornings in winter at the Congregational Church in Kewaunee sitting with my buddies in the pew up against the rear stained glass window paying far more attention to the live flies than to the sermon. After all, we highly inquisitive youngsters thought it was most unusual for flies to be on the wing in January. I’m sure that our Sunday school teacher, Walter Kacer, would have agreed with us.

Now we know full well that many flies, as well as other species, are capable of surviving the winter as adults. There is another pesky fly that I call the “cluster fly,” and which more appropriately is referred to as the face fly, that arrived in the U.S. in the early 1900s and has become extremely abundant here.

They are well known for their ability to enter a building through the tiniest crack imaginable, or squeeze behind the siding boards of houses, and spend the winter there. Come spring, they usually can’t find their way out of the building, such as my workshop up above our garage, and end up being attracted by the hundreds to the windows where they make a terrible mess.

Woodpeckers, notably Hairy Woodpeckers, seek out the wintering sites of these face flies behind the wooden siding of a house and peck a series of holes in quest of these tasty little morsels. As a matter of fact, the woodpeckers ruined the Western Cedar siding on our new home in the woods by making holes as large as softballs, to the point that we had to have our house resided – with aluminum siding! That fortunately brought an end to our woodpecker problems.

I bite my tongue every time someone calls to ask what they should do about the woodpeckers pecking holes into the cedar siding of their home. What else can I honestly tell them? Their best bet is to re-side their house with different woodpecker-proof material, such as that made of aluminum.

Surely you realize our feelings toward the face flies. They are referred to as face flies because of their attraction to the faces of cows grazing in fields. The flies lay their eggs on the cows’ manure and the emerging adults eventually find their way to your home’s attic or garage, or behind your wooden house siding!

It won’t be long now that we’ll be doing the first garden planting, most likely sugar snap peas along the four-foot high wooden-framed hardware-cloth fences held upright by steel fence posts. In the meantime we will harvest some wild leeks in our woods and keep looking for the first butterflies of spring.