The Regal Fritillary

The Regal Fritillary has a unique relationship with Fort Indiantown Gap.  You see, this butterfly feeds on arrow leaf violets.  These violets like to grow in disturbed habitats - places where the soil is churned and turned over fairly frequently.

This habitat is in short supply in much of the nation.  However, military vehicles with tracks, like tanks, are great at creating it.  Once the Fritillaries were found at the Fort, the military began special conservation measures to ensure they continue to have a home.

One of their firing ranges is now more or less dedicated to the Fritillary.  We were never in unsafe areas, obviously, but signs like these did kind of raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

  

Here are a couple more of my Fritillary pics:

As you can see, these were not particularly shy.  They enjoyed their butterfly weed while many lenses snapped around them :)  

The Kingdom of Ohio

Back to my 2015 Challenge reads.  I was totally sucked into this one by the cover.  But, I've been chugging away at it for the last few weeks, getting distracted by other books and then coming back to it.  That's usually a bad sign, indicating that my attention is not being held.  Which I think is a fair statement.  The narrator is not a natural storyteller, lost in the past as he is, and distances the reader from the action of the book.  

 

One of this book's biggest problems (related to the above) is that it spends far too much time telling us how crazy and incomprehensible and indecipherable the past events that the book is based on are.  So, when you find out what actually happened, you're left feeling a little underwhelmed.  I mean, the events are improbable, but considering I just read a book with not just time travel, but Egyptian cults, Gypsy doctors, insane clowns, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge being a bad ass, they're really not that out there.

The other problem is that the relationship that develops between Peter and Cheri-Anne is hard to believe.  They know each other for about a week, and have so little in common, and yet he pines for her the rest of his lifer?  It can happen, but the book doesn't really sell it.  And, this book is badly titled. There IS a Kingdom of Ohio, but it's not center stage.  Not much of it takes place in the Kingdom.  It puts you on the wrong footing right away.  Similar to how the stuff from the Roanoke Colony is introduced so late in the book, it's a distraction.

But I'm not being fair.  There are wonderful moments: meditations on memory and the relationship between past and future.  Detailed looks into how traveling through time can affect a person's psyche.  Interesting takes on early America and its technologies.  I want to say that this is a realistic look at time travel/world hopping, but that's ridiculous, isn't it?  A realistic look at unreal things, lol.  But if those things were possible, I bet this is how people would react.  Not instantly figuring out the circumstances and making brilliant and death defying moves, like characters in a blockbuster.  They probably would be hurt and confused and longing to get back to where they belong.

What really interests me, though, is that the author said he was influenced by Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, a book that is also on my list to read this year.  I'm wondering how this one will compare!    

Final call:

The good stuff averages out the bad stuff, so let's just leave it at three stars.      

Military Might = Butterfly Flight?

In this case, definitely yes!

For quite a while, we have wanted to make it to Fort Indiantown Gap's butterfly tours.  They do them two weekends in July, and that's it.  Fort Indiantown Gap is Pennsylvania's large Army & National Guard training facility.  You get the impression that all manner of things happen here, and they probably do.

But here's the deal.  They put on an excellent show.  There were 5-6 naturalists traveling with the probably close to 200 citizens who came to tour.  Specialists in butterflies, plants, birds, and more.  At the beginning, a pavilion had a lot of mounted winged creatures and skulls.  Here are some mounts of what we were about to go find live in the field.

For example, above are a few of the swallowtail type of butterfly, and also the fritillaries and sulphurs.  Below is a skull that I have to believe belonged to a heron of some sort.  

I have to say, I thought perhaps two dozen people would be on this tour.  But I was wrong.  The guides told us they expect 150-200 people per day.  And this was definitely the military.  All 100 cars or so were lined up in precision order, and given instructions on how to leave the site and proceed to the firing range that is home to the butterflies.  Here's the starting line :)

Now, we saw many butterflies this day.  But the star attraction is the Regal Fritillary, a butterfly known in only a few places in Pennsylvania, if not just this one location.  But Fort Indiantown Gap and the Regal Fritillary have a complex history, one that I'll share in the next post. 

Before we arrived, the main concern was ... would we really see a Regal Fritillary?  Or would it be a long shot?  Well, we didn't have to worry.  There were scads, and even without the high numbers, the naturalists were out to find one for us to see up close:

Here you go, the Regal Fritillary, in all of its glory.  In case you haven't noticed, these guys have been the banner on my Facebook page for a while.

The other common fritillaries in the area are the Great Spangled Fritillary and the Aphrodite, both of which have an even orange wash on both fore and hind wings.  The Regal Fritillary's hind wings are a deep black, making it stand out from the fritillaries and also the Monarch.

The big question, of course, is why the Regal Fritillary chooses a firing range as its home.  But more on that later ...

In the Woods (Not Literally, This Time)

Here's another book I picked up recently and decided to wedge in to this year's reading list (like many things in my life, chalk it up to a Chambersburg thrift store).  Part of the attraction was that it's set in Dublin and its suburbs.  And the other attraction is that every once in a while I just have a hankering for a good detective novel.  Plus, this one's set up is pretty engaging, when you read the back cover.

What I wasn't expecting was the quality of the writing.  Tana French is good!   And funny!  She's got a sly way with it.  She has great adjectives.  She describes someone's voice as "Daffy Duck with a Donegal accent," for pete's sake.  French is good at character development, too, because at the heart of this mystery, she's really exploring the personalities of and relationship between the two lead detectives.

There are two mysteries in this book:  one based in Detective Ryan's past, and the one he's investigating in the present.  We do get an answer - terrifying and unsatisfactory as it may be - to the present-day mystery.  The past mystery, though, that one's handled in a more artful and subjective manner, and we come, along with Detective Ryan, to accept that we'll never know what happened.  Considering I was afraid the book would go all Shutter Island on me, that's a relief, actually.

The whole shebang, in all its aspects, is just handled very well.

Final call:

Aaaaaaaand now I have more books to read, because I found out that this is the first book in the Dublin Murder Squad series.  A wonderful problem to have!

Now for the Mountain Tops

As we headed out of Shenandoah, we hiked to what is apparently one of the few 360 degree views in the park.  So sayeth our guidebook, in any case.  

Bearfence  Mountain is home to a relatively short loop, if you want it to be, but part of it is a pretty decent rock scramble.  That being said, as promised, the views were more than worth the effort.

Here's Justin, mid-scramble.  This one wasn't terribly tough as far as it went, but one spot did have some precarious balancing that - I'll be honest - made me wig out.  But I made it!

Back at the trailhead, we found a small flock of Cedar Waxwings in a dead snag.  Here's a couple shots I got.  

And one Waxwing, vamoosing.  

There's one more thing I want to show you from this weekend.  We were out at the right time for Mountain Laurel to be in bloom.  While this is Pennsylvania's state flower, it's just as pretty in Virginia.  These were blooming behind the museum in Rapidan Camp.  

And with this, we'll leave Shenandoah behind, even though there's a few more adventures that didn't translate to photographs well :)

The Rest of Shenandoah

After visiting Rapidan Camp by trail, we returned to the campground to find our site surrounded by about a dozen hikers fresh off some long-distance hiking on the AT.  We thought maybe they'd be tired, and therefore sedate, but noooooooo.

We got tired of their extended and exaggerated loud yapping and so decided to go watch the sunset from one of the overlooks along Skyline Drive.

I took these shots with my phone, and took the opportunity to goof off with filters.  I like both effects, but I think the black and white edges out the color.  If you can't tell from the photos, this was both a beautiful and a relaxing evening.

The last rays of the sun caught a blooming shrub in a particularly nice way.  When I don't know what a shrub is, and it's flowering, a lot of times I'll say that I think it might be a viburnum.  So, folks, this is a viburnum ;)

And well, you know what?  I forgot one of the best parts of the campground.  Justin walked just a short ways into the woods from our site, looking for downed wood.  He wasn't gone long when I heard a "Pssst!" followed by a "Bring your camera!"  I could not imagine what would stay still long enough for me to get down there, much less take a picture.

Turns out it was this fellow - a very small fawn who was very suspicious of our activity.  Not wanting to cause any undue stress (life's hard enough!), we left pretty quickly and didn't alert anyone else to its presence.  

Shenandoah in June

I'm getting a little out of order here, but bear with me.  Exactly one week after we returned from Ireland, we made a quick weekend trip down to Shenandoah National Park.  We hit some fantastic weather - warm but not crazy hot, sunny with dramatic fogs and clouds.

This park more or less demands the use of the pano function on the old iPhone camera.  Anytime you get a view, it's usually miles of mountain blue and valley green and one frame doesn't catch nearly enough of it to give the proper scale.

These are a couple of the overlooks we encountered as we drove south.  We intended to camp but left the campground itself to chance.  Matthews Arm looked big and open and not overly inviting, so we decided to head further south, to Lewis Mountain Campground, which is the smallest in the park.

After we snagged a spot, we decided to hike down to Rapidan Camp.  Before this hike, we did not know that Herbert Hoover had a camp in Shenandoah.  Camp actually does not give you a sense of the size and complexity of the thing.  But this was a great spot to visit.

Actually, the biggest excitement happened just a few hundred yards along the trail.  We're zipping a long, and a bear pops up right next to the trail.  I screamed, it screamed.  It ran away, but not very far, and then followed us for about 100 feet.  Kept us hopping!

Rapidan Camp is at the bottom of this particular trail.  Not many of the buildings are left (there were a lot!), but a few cabins still stand, and so do the chimneys of a few others.  

There's a small waterfall along this trail.  We caught it as the sun was filtering through the trees above it.

And it turns out that we would have interesting wildlife encounters on the way down to the Camp and on the way back.  Near the top of the trail, we met a pair of white-tailed deer traveling downwards.  

We caught sight of them and stopped in our tracks, and watched them approach within about 50 feet of us before veering off to the left and looping around us.