Winter Is Not Over Until Mourning Cloak Butterfly Gardens Fill Up

Summary: Plant or support planned or wild mourning cloak butterfly gardens in Canada, Mexico and the United States and North America’s mourning cloaks will show up.

Mourning Cloaks often are seen as spring's first butterflies because they overwinter; their common name links with old-fashioned custom of widows wearing dark cloaks during mourning; mourning cloak butterfly in Jefferson County, Washington: Dan Magneson/USFWS - Pacific Region (USFWS Pacific), CC BY NC 2.0, via Flickr

The mourning cloaks of North America are in planned and wild mourning cloak butterfly gardens in Canada, Mexico and the United States well before the earliest March occurrences of Easter and Passover.

Mourning cloaks that emerge from pupation in late fall and that overwinter as adults become active whenever temperatures rise above 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15.56 degrees Celsius). They can raise their body warmth quickly to 15 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) above ambient temperatures through glycerols, chemicals that act like antifreezes, and isometrics. Their presence in brush and log piles or under loose bark does not get detected because of body coloration reminiscent of sunny patches on woody surfaces.

Life cycles and natural histories sustained exclusively by hardwood shrubs and trees explain the mourning cloak’s presence in North America, northern Eurasia and northern South America.

Planned and wild mourning cloak butterfly gardens furnish mourning cloaks with habitat niches that support four-stage life expectancies of 38 to 80 days for non-overwintering adults.

Eggs deposited in circular clusters of 30 to over 100 around twigs go from yellow-white to red, then black, before hatching in four to 14 days. Mourning cloaks have 21- to 28-day larval stages as black-bodied, black-headed, black-spined, red-legged, red-spotted, white-dappled caterpillars that feed side by side and thrash synchronously when disturbed. The pupal stage, unlike the clustered egg and larval stages, is spent solitarily as a blue-black or light tan-colored, 7- to 18-day chrysalis with pink-tipped bumps.

Females join males in celebrating adulthoods, as fleeting as 6 to 20 days for non-overwintering adults, by courting, mating, mud-puddling, sipping juices and sap and sun-basking.

Adult male mourning cloaks keep busy moving from perch to perch in order to patrol territories more than 300 square yards (250.84 square meters) in area.

Adults in planned and wild mourning cloak butterfly gardens like their mud puddles nutritiously salty and their overripe fruits and oak or red maple saps sugary. They manage to escape predation by falling down and playing dead if caught sun-basking with wings either closed upward and turned sunward or spread horizontally outward.

Seasoned butterfly watchers note that the mourning cloak butterfly’s flight patterns, as a combination of graceful glides and quick, strong jerks, can be difficult to track. They also observe that females and males fly in upward spirals reminiscent of courtship rejections among gray hairstreaks and that males click their wings while flying.

Fields, forest opening, gardens, parks, watercourses, wetlands, woodland openings and yards provide habitat niches that are or may become planned and wild mourning cloak butterfly gardens.

Aspens, birches, cottonwoods, elms, hackberries, hawthorns, poplars, wild roses and willows qualify as preferred hostplants for eggs, larvae and pupae and as sap sources for adults. Pruning schedules and storm clean-ups reward butterfly gardeners and professional arborists with sightings of mourning cloaks, whose velvet-brown wings have blue dashes above crepe-looking yellow borders. Woody plant-dominated gardens within mixed non-woody and woody ecosystems sustain mourning cloak butterflies, also known as Camberwell beauties in England and yellow-bordered butterflies among English speakers.

Gardeners and naturalists think of daffodils, forsythia, groundhogs, robins and spring azures as spring’s harbingers even though winter is not over until the mourning cloak flies.

mourning cloak butterfly (Nymphalis antiopa): Descanso Gardens @DescansoGardens via Twitter April 17, 2015

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

mourning cloak butterfly; Jefferson County, northwestern Washington; March 29, 2013: Dan Magneson/USFWS - Pacific Region (USFWS Region), CC BY NC 2.0, via Flickr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwspacific/8601370114/

mourning cloak butterfly (Nymphalis antiopa): Descanso Gardens @DescansoGardens via Twitter April 17, 2015, @ https://twitter.com/DescansoGardens/status/589121044147007488

For further information:

Descanso Gardens @DescansoGardens. 17 April 2015. "This week, a Mourning Cloak butterfly landed on Natives Horticulturist Layla Valenzuela's hand. Perfect timing." Twitter.
Available @ https://twitter.com/DescansoGardens/status/589121044147007488

Green, Emily. 26 June 2003. “All Aflutter.” Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
Available @ http://www.xerces.org/2003/06/26/all-aflutter/

NatureBytes. 28 May 2009. “Mourning Cloak Butterfly (Nymphalis antiopa)." YouTube.
Available @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utulY5HfPd0