This week is Pollinator week! And this year’s theme is Life on a Leaf: Celebrating Caterpillars and Host Plants. The theme highlights the importance of lepidoptera in the United States – the nearly 11,000 species of moths and 750 species of butterflies that pollinate flowers – and the plant species they depend on for breeding, feeding, and overwintering.
This year’s “Pollinator of the Year” is the Swallowtail Butterfly. There are some thirty species of the Swallowtail here in the U.S. and nearly 600 species around the world – here’s the one I commonly see in my garden. You can find swallowtails around gardens, lilac trees, and puddles - they love slurping up salts from the mud.
Pollinator Week is also your chance to get involved in a community science project: Pollinator Bioblitz. All you have to do is sign in on your iNaturalist account and join the project. (If you don’t have an iNaturalist account, it’s pretty easy to set up.) Then, during pollinator week, take photos of the bees, wasps, butterflies, moths, hoverflies, hummingbirds, and bats you see flying around and landing on flowers.
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