American interlude

So you're not in England, Mr W?

Nope. How did you guess?

Well, we certainly don't see glorious Scarce Swallowtails like that here. In France, Spain or Greece, OK, plenty. But we're too foggy and damp.

True enough, though this wonderful creature is actually an Western Tiger Swallowtail, an American relative of the Scarce, because P and I have been in California for a week, attending a touching memorial and celebration for her first cousin. A couple of days after taking the pictures above in Palo Alto, the centre of Silicon Valley, I spotted a similar-looking butterfly in the beautiful grounds of the nearby historic home of Filoli. I nearly didn't bother to take another picture but I.m glad I did. This one, shown in the two pictures below, was not an Eastern Tiger but another relative. The Pale or Pallid Swallowtail; aptly named as you can see if you compare it with the stronger lemon-yellow of the Eastern Tiger.

We pride ourselves on the beauty and inventiveness of English names for butterflies and moths, with good reason, but the Americans go one better in my view. There's an energy and directness, perhaps like Mark Twain compared with Jane Austen. Here's the Buckeye for example, in a garden (or yard as the Americans prosaically call them) in downtown Palo Alto:

And here's a Fiery Skipper and a Lulworth Skipper, separately and then darting about in either angry or amorous manoeuvres on lavender with a possible Rural Skipper involved as well. 

 

Sharing the bush with them in the Alto Hills was a Funereal Duskywing, a very solemn moniker for an admittedly rather subdued-looking insect - although it has a light fringe not unlike the Camberwell Beauty whose alternative name is Mourning Cloak.

On a bush in a wooded part of the trail - doubtless toxic like the ubiquitous Poison Ivy and Poison Oak which put you off exploring very effectively, I also saw these two butterflies which the iPhone's Bug identifier suggests are members of the Copper family, the second perhaps a Tailed Copper judging by the just-visible detail on its left hindwing.

This very definitely tailed beauty, below, in the Elizabeth F Gamble garden in central Palo Alto - a lovely, freely-open space tended by eager volunteers - is a Grey Hairstreak, another very smart-looking butterfly which we sadly don't see in the UK:

And so to my only moth, a drab visitor on the doorstep of the cousins' home which another young cousin, a very keen insect student, identified kindly as a Black Rustic. It lacks the distinctive golden wing marks and steeply isosceles shape of our UK moth of the same name but has a similar, rather foreboding presence. My iPhone counters that it may alternatively be Aseptis fumosa, a moth widespread in the Western US but apparently not yet honoured with an English name.

My last American minibeast is a Carpenter Bee, perhaps a Valley one. It was single-mindedly nectaring on the Baby Sage and took no notice of my cautious pursuit.

The chaparral or maquis and woodland above Palo Alto is full of other animals, some of which we did not want to meet - see below. Our cousins have had rattlesnakes, bobcats, coyotes and - once - a cougar or mountain lion in their garden and the notices on the hiking trails are to be taken seriously.

Here are some milder animals and birds, all of them very common both in the wild and the gardens of the large houses which fringe the hills: deer, wild turkeys, Western Fence Lizards, quails, a humming bird, a raven and a mourning dove.  

And not forgetting Sasha the resident Jack Russell and Winston the aptly-named visiting bulldog.