Lime Butterfly

The thirty eight butterfly from my garden is the Lime Butterfly ( Papilio demoleus ), this is a very common Indian butterfly.

It visits our garden at noon, and seems to enjoy good sunshine. They love to mud puddle, and I had blogged about them many years ago, when I spotted them in Bangalore mud puddling.
Like their name suggests, they lay their eggs of citrus plants and are known to migrate. Since the butterfly visits us only during sunny days, there was more than adequate light available to photograph them- evident from the washed out flowers and leaves in the above photograph. 

Common Jay

The thirty fifth butterfly in the series is the Common Jay ( Graphium doson ). The butterfly is on constant flight and despite all my patience, I could not find it perched steady , even for a fleeting moment. 

Like all other butterflies, the Common Jay too needs minerals. It gets its minerals from damp soil or animal urine. The males use a filter feeding technique to get their minerals from soil. It sucks water, with its long proboscis,  from which minerals like sodium is extracted. It constantly pumps water through its body and expels the surplus from its anus. This expelled water is used to further dissolve minerals in the ground and is re-ingested.

Blue Mormon

I have never measured it, but this Blue Mormon (Papilio polymnestor ) is probably the biggest butterfly in our garden. 

It is one of the most handsome butterflies, with blue flashing colour on its wings. It is bigger than some of the birds that visit us. The only plant that it visits in our garden is a Ixora bush. It takes about five minutes to visit all the flowers on that bush and after that it is gone.
I had featured a Common Mormon as a second butterfly in the series, the question I asked my self is- Why were these butterflies named Mormon, i.e. after a American religious group. A bit of digging I came up with this tit-bit. Harish Gaonkar, of the Natural History Museum in London, recently wrote that "the origins of giving common English names to organisms, particularly butterflies for tropical species started in India around the mid 19th century . . . The naming of Mormons evolved slowly. I think the first to get such a name was the Common Mormon (Papilio polytes), because it had three different females, a fact that could only have been observed in the field, and this they did in India. The name obviously reflected the . . . Mormon sect in America, which as we know, practiced polygamy."
Interesting theory I must admit.

Tailed Jay

The twentieth butterfly in the Butterfly from my garden series is the 'Tailed Jay' ( Graphium agamemnon ). 

In the photograph it is sitting on the leaf of the pumpkin creeper, else this restless flier prefers our custard apple tree or the Ashoka tree. 

Among insects, is a large group called 'Lepidoptera' ( meaning scaly wing). Butterflies and moths come under this group. Butterflies themselves are classified into two superfamilies; One is the 'Hesperioidea' which has only one family in it - the Skippers (Hesperiidae). The other superfamily is the Papilionoidea and encompasses four families: Swallowtails ( Papilionidea), Whites and Yellows ( Pieridae) , Brush-footed butterfly ( Nymphalidae) and Blues ( Lycaenidae). 

India has about 1501 Species , of which 321 are skippers, 107 Swallowtails, 109 whites and Yellows, 521 Brush-footed and 443 Blues. 

The Tailed Jay belongs to the swallowtail family.

Common Mormon

The second butterfly in the series is Papilio polytes a.k.a Common Mormon. The females of this species occur in three forms. The form featured here is the 'romulus,' in which the butterfly imitates the 'Crimson Rose'

 This is a pretty common butterfly, but takes a bit of getting used to in the field, to separate it from the 'rose' species. One thing I noticed when photographing these butterflies was that the females fly quite slow and leisurely, while the males seem to be in some hurry. Hence I managed to photograph a few females during flight, but photographing a male even perched turned out to be quite a challenge.

One of the favourite flowers of these butterflies is the Lanterna flowers featured above.

Amazingly they seem to prefer the wild variety, giving the purple, yellow and white lanterna in our garden a complete miss.

The fast flying male, Common Mormon is featured above. 

Common Rose

The first butterfly in the 'Butterfly from my garden" series is the Common Rose (Atrophaneura aristolochiae). This large, slow flying butterfly is also the most conspicuous in our garden. I used to see it every day, but it never seemed to perch on any of the plants that we had planted.   

So for a week I followed this butterfly and finally found it's favourite plant. A weed creeper, which gives purple flowers, and grows in a nondescript section of our garden. Once I discovered this secret spot, I set my tripod and spent an entire morning, photographing this beauty.

The Common Rose is a gentle flyer and though difficult I managed to get a two photographs of the butterfly in flight-it took more than 200 attempts to get  those two, one of which is the above.

This butterfly is pretty commonly found in India in open, cultivated areas, scrub and deciduous forests. This butterfly is mimicked by female common Mormon (will feature that in the next post).

Other than the female Common Mormon, the butterfly also resembles the Malabar Rose and Crimson rose.

The butterfly belongs to the Swallowtail family and has a red body.