Anybody Seen My Focus?: Great Spangled Fritillary

Showing posts with label Great Spangled Fritillary. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Great Spangled Fritillary (Speyeria cybele)

August 28^th, 2014. An individual Great Spangled Fritillary was feeding at the Giant Ironweed flowers. These fritillaries are very large compared with the Variegated and Gulf fritillaries that we see at home in Walton County, Georgia.

The gray spots on the underside of the wing are actually silver spots.

The following images that were taken in Fannin County, Georgia, in October 2012 and show the upper side of the wings fully extended as well as the pattern on the underside of the wing.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Great Spangled Fritillary (Speyeria cybele)

September 2nd, 2012. It was the Labor Day (US) holiday weekend so we took the opportunity to make an overnight trip into the Chattahoochee National Forest. After making our way out of the Coopers Creek Wildlife Management Area, we drove up to Blue Ridge for the night. We retraced our way up the Noontootla River Valley through the Blue Ridge Wildlife Management Area as we had in mid-December 2011 but, instead of driving southwest, we drove north on Winding Stair Gap and Rock Creek Roads.

We caught our first glimpse of a Great Spangled Fritillary a couple of months ago in the Wilson Shoals Wildlife Management Area but didn’t manage to get a photograph. So we were on the lookout for them on this weekend. Great SpangledFritillaries are more widely distributed in the eastern United States than are the Diana Fritillaries and their range in Georgia extends further down into the state than does the Diana Fritillary. The Great Spangled Fritillary is another ‘big’ fritillary – about the same size as the female Diana Fritillary or a swallowtail. There are nine subpsecies of Speyeria cybele and the color patterns differ quite a lot. Speyeria cybele subsp. cybele is the subspecies that occurs in Georgia.

We were rewarded with our first sighting of a Great Spangled Fritillary as we were driving along Winding Stair Road. The butterfly was…

Feeding on a very tall thistle in the shade. This photograph was taken with zoom and flash. The butterfly has reflective, metallic spots, similar to the Gulf Fritillary, on the underside of the wing that appear grey due to the angle at which the light hit the spots.

We found a second fritillary ‘sharing’ the thistle flowers with the Diana Fritillary near the fish hatchery on Rock Creek Road. Thistle flowers are a magnet for butterflies at this time of year.

It was hectic on the thistles - competing with the Diana Fritillaries - and this fritillary was taking a ‘time out’ on a nearby tree before returning to the thistles…