One my my fav highlights of 2018 was witnessing this incredible site in my backyard where I rescued this pair from being stepped on in our walkway. At first I thought it was some unheard of interspecies mating of a Black Swallowtail and Tiger Swallowtail butterflies but soon discovered, thanks to google, that the black one is not a Black Swallowtail. It is a Tiger Swallowtail! A very small percentage of female only Tiger Swallowtails are dark morph.
One site said getting a photo of them mating is "the holy grail of butterfly shots".
They mated longer than most humans, lol, so I got a bunch of amazing photos after relocating them into the bushes.
The dark morph females still have their tiger strips that are hard to see but can be seen in the light.
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Just incredible. Tiger Swallowtails are a sexually dimorphic species. Some have coloration that fall between light and dark morphs, and more rare are hermaphroditic gyandromorphs containing traits of both sexes.
Wow wow WOW
We thought this was a once in a lifetime experience, but a few weeks later got to see it again!!! A few hundred feet from the first sighting, these two were on our shed!
They flew off the shed into the trees. So utterly amazing.
Nature rewarding us bigtime for being a Certified Wildlife Habitat, not using poison chemicals, being a safe sanctuary zone for our insect friends :)
