Individual pale green eggs are generally laid on the lower leaves. Importance as a caterpillar food source: Zebra Swallowtails use pawpaw leaves as a food source. Other common names for this plant include Poor Man's Banana. Her essays have appeared in Brevity, Fourth Genre, The Hopper and other journals and her current project is an urban-nature almanac called Hackberry Appreciation Society. Joanna Brichetto is a certified Tennessee Naturalist in Nashville, where she writes about everyday wonders in everyday habitat loss. and Nashville Natives.įor a quick, printable list of host and nectar plants for Middle Tennessee, see this list from the North American Butterfly Association.įor a comprehensive (and beautiful) butterfly field guide, see Butterflies of Tennessee: Field and Garden, by Rita Venable. Or try one of our local, all-native nurseries GroWild, Inc. Select the “Native” tag to see trees offered in this category. Shop for native trees during the NTCC Farm-to-Yard Tree Sale. The butterfly icon shows how many species a genus hosts. To learn which trees (and other plants) are native to our area, type your zip code into the National Wildlife Federation Native Plant Finder. Instead of mowing, blowing, and bagging, move your leaves to garden beds and tree roots. Many caterpillars and pupae wait out the winter in leaf litter. Don’t be too tidy: winter seed-heads feed birds, and dead stalks hide hibernating bees. Convert a 4x4’ patch of lawn into a Pollinator Garden with native host plants and nectar flowers.Try to add at least one new native plant every year. Instead, use common-sense mosquito prevention tactics. Despite aggressive advertising, mosquito fogging won’t make a dent in mosquito control but will kill non-target wildlife like fireflies, butterflies, bees and ladybugs. Skip the herbicide and pesticide on your lawn, shrubs, trees and flowers. A native oak in Middle Tennessee can host over 400 species of butterflies and moths! If you’ve only got room for one new tree in your yard, make it an oak: the top producer in any foodweb. The trees that host the most butterfly and moth species are our native oaks, cherries, willows, maples, hickories and crabapples. Leaves feed the Tawny Emperor, American Snout, Question Mark, Mourning Cloak and the “social butterfly” most likely to hitch a ride on a passing human: the Hackberry Emperor. Red-Spotted Purples can use Willows, Black cherry, Cottonwood and others.Įven our humble Hackberry tree is a larval host for butterflies. Another showy butterfly, the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, can lay eggs on several native trees, including Tulip poplar, Black cherry, Sweetbay magnolia, Hawthorn and Serviceberry. Not all caterpillars are such picky eaters. Take milkweed, for instance: the host that Monarch caterpillars can’t live without. The fancy term for this specialized relationship is “larval host plant.” A plant is a host if it feeds the larval stages of an insect. A butterfly mom knows this, so when it is time to lay eggs, she searches for the native plants she needs. They only eat leaves of select plants with which they’ve co-evolved. All butterfly larvae-the very hungry caterpillars-need the right baby food to survive.
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