There are Tiger Swallowtails everywhere this year. I see them in meadows feeding on Milkweed and flitting through the trees on unknown missions in the deep forest. I see them at Laudholm Farm, Emmons Preserve, Saco Heath, Old Falls Pond, the Waterboro Barrens, and the Kennebunk Plains. I have seen several in our yard, and actually photographed one on our apple blossoms. I almost thought we were going to get out of the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens without seeing one, but one final turn around the Garden of the Senses and the great lawn after lunch turned up a lovely specimen feeding in a stand of purple Cone Flower.

Olympus OM-D E-M10 with 75-300mm zoom. 600mm equivalent. Shutter preferred. 1/500th @ ISO 200 @ f7.1. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet. Cropped for scale and composition.

And for the Sunday Thought: Comparatively speaking we do not have a lot of Butterflies in New England (compared say, to South Texas)…especially big showy butterflies like the Swallowtail. There are summers when a single sighting would be exciting. This year we have Swallowtails in abundance. I have no idea why, and I don’t even know how to begin to speculate. 🙂 But I am, of course, happy to see them, and I will undoubtedly photograph every one that will sit even remotely still for me. And I will give thanks. I know, year to year, on average, it is our most common big Butterfly. In fact nothing else in New England comes close to its size. So, common or not, every single one is a blessing. Even in a year of abundance, any day with a Swallowtail in it is more blessed than a day without. I have cherrios for breakfast every morning in the warm days of summer (oatmeal in the winter), but that does not mean I should forget to be thankful for cherrios any morning. A day with cherrios in it is always more blessed than a day without. And we do good to remember that. No matter how common the Swallowtails are this summer.