| VOLUME XXX No. 321 | Narrowsburg, NY | August 5 - 11, 2004 |
Mid-summer visitors. In August it’s common to find this week’s subjects in gardens and rural yards. Argiope spiders always wait head downward at the center of circular webs they suspend from silken frames. They have poor vision and depend on vibrations within the web to locate prey. The red-spotted purple butterfly, exhausted, tattered and bleached by the sun, refused to sip nectar from the flower where I placed it after removing it from the barn. I’d forgotten that its diet is principally animal droppings and fermented fruit. |
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| TRR photo by Ed Wesely | |
| The large size of this web-spinning spider, called a black-and-yellow argiope, identifies it as a female. Ribbed patterns on each side of the abdomen, which appear white in the photo, are bright yellow in nature. (Click for larger version) |
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| TRR photo by Ed Wesely | |
| This dark woodland butterfly, called a red-spotted purple, has a habit of perching on woodland roads or darting across them, often to its sorrow. (Click for larger version) |
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