Spring Azure Butterfly Gardens for North America’s Spring Azures

Summary: Spring azure butterfly gardens beckon North America’s spring azures to celebrate spring with daffodils, forsythia, groundhogs, mourning cloaks and robins.

male spring azure butterfly (Celastrina ladon), Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park, north central Washington: Walter Siegmund, CC BY SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Spring azures arrive early in spring azure butterfly gardens even when snow still covers the ground and regardless of whether Easter, Passover and spring occur early in March or late in April.

Spring azure butterflies of North America belong among the members known as blues in the fragile-looking, iridescent-winged, light-weighing gossamer family that includes coppers, hairstreaks and metalmarks. They can look darker-winged and smaller-bodied in the north’s one brood from April to September and in the south’s three flight periods from February to November.

Arborists, master gardeners, master naturalists and tree stewards describe spring azure flight patterns as high, lazy, slow flutters among flowering branches or over flowering non-woody plants.

Spring azure life cycles and natural histories emphasize the role of flowers in serving as sources of food and of shelter throughout all four biological stages.

Buds in spring azure butterfly gardens furnish shelter for cushion-like, dimpled, single-deposit eggs with pale green depressions and white raised points for three to six days.

Bristles grow short everywhere except along the lower sides and rear of the green, pink, red-brown or white caterpillar with cream-splotched sides and dark mid-dorsal lines. Caterpillars have two or three weeks to pupate, amid leaf litter or on stems, into chrysalises that are tan earlier, and brown later, in the year.

The life expectancy of the black-marked, light or yellowish brown pupal stage is eight to 12 days for non-hibernators and four to six months for overwinterers. Four- to 10-day adult stages join to give total four- to eight-week life expectancies without any hibernating chrysalises and 4 1/2 to eight months with overwintering pupae.

Colors that vary by gender, geography and season keep butterfly-watchers from feeling clueless since early born, more northerly spring azures have dark-hued, dark-marked under-sides and upper-sides. The forewings and the hindwings of females and of males always look delicate and thin-scaled, oftentimes seem iridescent and sometimes take on smudged or washed-out appearances. They may communicate more of a fragile blue or a tenuous violet in Canada and the United States and more of a ghostly white in Mexico.

Thomas Allen, Jim Brock and Jeffrey Glassberg’s Caterpillars in the Field and Garden notes: “Our understanding of the population genetics of this species is still rudimentary.”

Clarence Moores Weed’s Butterflies Worth Knowing observes that this “wee bit of a gossamer-winged creature … has caused American scientists an immense amount of patient labor.”

Protective chemicals provide no defenses for spring azure butterflies, whose larval stages count upon ants to serve as bodyguards in exchange for excretions of protein-rich honeydew. Black snakeroot, blueberry, crown-beard, flowering dogwood, maple leaved viburnum, meadowsweet, New Jersey tea and sumac qualify as favorites in planned and wild spring azure butterfly gardens. Caterpillars never reject as alternatives bearberry, blackberry, cherry, clover, columbine, daisy, holly, honeysuckle, hops, horse-chestnut, horsebalm, lupine, milkweed, nasturtium, oak, privet, sarsaparilla, shadbush, sunflower and willow.

Seeds satiate caterpillars while adults sip on nectars from blackberry, buckeye, dandelion, dogbane, milkweed, New Jersey tea, privet, rock-cress and winter-cress and nutrients from mud puddles.

Poet Robert Frost’s “Blue-Butterfly Day” filled with “sky-flakes” takes spring azure butterfly-lovers into planned and wild deciduous wood-friendly desert scrub, fields, marshes, mountains, roadsides and swamps.

ventral (top) and dorsal (bottom) views of spring azure butterfly's (Celastrina ladon) wings: maggie terlecki @chezeury via Twitter June 25, 2015

Acknowledgment

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

Image credits:

spring azure butterfly: Walter Siegmund, CC BY SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Celastrina_ladon_03745.JPG

ventral (top) and dorsal (bottom) views of spring azure butterfly's (Celastrina ladon) wings: maggie terlecki‏ @chezeury via Twitter June 24, 2015, @ https://twitter.com/chezeury/status/613930821494407169

For further information:

Allen, Thomas J.; James P. Brock; and Jeffrey Glassberg. 2 June 2005. Caterpillars in the Field and Garden: A Field Guide to the Butterfly Caterpillars of North America. Butterflies Through Binoculars Field Series Edited by Jeffrey Glassberg. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc.

Frost, Robert. 1923. “Blue-Butterfly Day.” New Hampshire. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company.
Available @ http://www.portitude.org/literature/frost/pt-blue_butterfly_day.php

Layberry, Ross A.; Peter W. Hall; and J. Donald Lafontaine. 1998. The Butterflies of Canada. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Material reproduced with permission on 2014-07-09 for “Spring Azure (Celastrina ladon) (Cramer, [1780]).” Canadian Biodiversity Information Facility > Species Bank > Butterflies of Canada.
Available @ http://www.cbif.gc.ca/eng/species-bank/butterflies-of-canada/spring-azure/?id

maggie terlecki‏ @chezeury. 24 June 2015. "Spring Azure Butterfy [sic]." Twitter.
Available @ https://twitter.com/chezeury/status/613930821494407169

Marriner, Derdriu. 12 June 2015. "Celastrina ladon: Blue Brilliance of Spring Azure Butterfly." Earth and Space News. Friday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2015/06/celastrina-ladon-blue-brilliance-of.html

Weed, Clarence Moores. 1917. Butterflies Worth Knowing. Little Nature Library Series. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company.
Available via Biodiversity Heritage Library @ http://dx.doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.9253