NATURE
MONCTON NATURE NEWS
July 27, 2025
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John also photographed a banded
tussock moth from two angles, as well as a female American redstart.
**On
Saturday morning, Anne-Marie Leger found several beautiful black swallowtail
butterfly caterpillars on the parsnip in her garden in Dalhousie. Anne
Marie comments that she was quite happy to share the parsnip with these little
beauties.
(Editor’s note: Anne Marie’s report makes for an interesting scenario. Anne Marie lives near the Gulf of St. Lawrence where the short-tailed swallowtail butterfly, with its very limited worldwide distribution, can occur, making the location a possibility and the timing happens to be right. The caterpillars of the common black swallowtail butterfly and the short-tailed black swallowtail butterfly can be a challenge to distinguish from one another. In consultation with butterfly expert Jim Edsall, he felt that the fact that it was feeding on parsnip in a garden, rather than members of the carrot/parsnip family in a coastal marsh habitat, very much limits the chance of it being a short-tailed swallowtail caterpillar.
No matter which species it really is, it has to be considered an
honour to have these colourful critters share our garden crop.)
**There are some large patches of
common milkweed along the Petitcodiac River trail in the vicinity of the
skateboard park and to the west.
On Sunday, Georges Brun spotted a monarch
butterfly in one of the patches that was joined by a male, and he noted them
mating. The traffic was very heavy in the area at the time, and he was unable
to search the area more seriously for more monarch butterfly activity.
**Fred
Dube saw and photographed a luna moth day resting on the side of the
foundation at his Lower Coverdale home Friday morning. A beautiful specimen
indeed.
**Sheiligh Price and her family have been seeing in an albinistic common grackle several times at their bird feeder in Riverview, NB. They saw it first on July 12. The blackbird clan seems to be prone to developing white/light areas of unpigmented plumage, but it is unusual for it to involve so much of the plumage. Sheilagh mentions it is creamy coloured so leucistic may be the more proper terminology.
**Rheal
Vienneau came across an immature, very small American toad (suspected) in his yard,
barely the width of his finger.
**Pat
Gibbs took note of the unique seeds of field pennycress to get some nice
close-up photos.
**While driving
to PEI just past Baie Verte on Route 16, Leigh and Joanne
Eaton saw two sandhill cranes on Saturday, adjacent to a herd of
cattle grazing in a field near the highway
Nelson Poirier.
Nature Moncton
