Flying Visitors

Last summer brought very few flying visitors to my yard, a big disappointment for me and my camera, but gradually this year, I’m finding some beauties visiting once again.

This first visitor is something I’ve never seen before, a “common whitetail skimmer (dragonfly).”  It showed up on the concrete pad by the deck stairs, sat there for a couple hours and I haven’t seen it again.

common whitetail skimmer dragonfly

This “red admiral” was an early spring visitor.  They were reported to be migrating in huge swarms, and we seemed to be at the edge of their route with only an occasional one
stopping by briefly.  I posted this one earlier, but wanted to include him here.

Red Admiral

“Tiger swallowtails,” have flown in several different days.  They were really flitting and fluttering in the strong winds we’ve experienced at times, hard to photograph, so I took hundreds of photos!

Tiger Swallowtails

Tiger Swallowtail

Tiger Swallowtail

Just a couple nights’ ago, I spotted this “clearwing hummingbird moth” flying around those same bee balm flowers the  swallowtails like.  He wasn’t around very long and I only got one shot, not the best, but wanted to share.

Clearwing Hummingbird Moth

Another day, I spent quite a bit of time trying to capture some honey bees busy at our corn stalk tassels.  I’ll save those for another posting.

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