Sunday, April 27, 2008

Butterflies Before the Snow

Minnesota is known as the land of 10,000 lakes but what most people, who do not live in this area, do not know is that Minnesota is also the land of 10,000 weather changes. For instance last weekend started off cloudy, then it cleared up and by mid week the temps were getting close to 80 degrees, and then by Friday our temps were down in the 30s and 40s and we got snow over night. This not only screws up nature enthusiast, like myself, I imagine it does a pretty good job of screwing up the flora and fauna also. Like last Sunday when the sun finally came out I made a trip to Fort Snelling State Park to do a bit of birding. While I was birding I was excited to see another eastern comma butterfly.
This is the second eastern comma that I have photographed this year, however I have not seen many butterflies since I saw the first one a couple weeks before at the North Mississippi Regional Park. There were a couple of nice high 60s days back then and I spotted a couple of butterflies but then the weather changed and got a bit colder and the butterflies became scarce again.
When it warmed up again last weekend the butterflies came back out, I photographed this mourning cloak at Fort Snelling last Sunday also, but I am afraid that now that the weather has changed again, that I probably wont see butterflies again until it warms up.

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