Thanks, I did see your post and have some prairie sage newly planted this year. I have at least five different host plant species for them. The problem is they are just all so small still. If it was just one or two caterpillars it would be ok I think. The problem I had before is that every time I brought in food for the first few caterpillars more eggs hatched on it and their numbers grew exponentially. I ended up just having to put quite a few back outside on a host plant to fend for themselves when I couldn't find anything else they would eat. It seems these ladies regularly do very large egg dumps here and most of the eggs and tiny cats don't get eaten. I hope my prairie sage takes off soon, it was still a softball sized clump last time I checked. It seems the butterfly population and I can't get synchronized. A few years ago I had large numbers of monarchs and was running out of food. So I planted A LOT of milkweed that is now very plentiful and huge, but haven't had many monarchs since. The tigers and silver spotted skippers had a really good year a couple of years ago but I had no host plants at all. Now that I have good host plants for them, they are no shows. Hopefully if I just keep planting and increasing my stock of host plants all will get used eventually. I don't think that it helps any that they are currently doing mosquito spraying, gypsy moth spraying, and cutting down all the ash trees damaged by emerald ash borer. That is in addition to the non-stop herbicide and pesticide use.

Thanks everyone. I just used an old sharp viewcam VL-Z3 on a tripod only a foot away. The finches excepted it quickly. I have to set it an forget it but the tapes are inexpensive. There was so much activity I didn't have to edit much.

He looks very pleased with himself in his snazzy breeding plumage. Claire

Genealogy is another of my interests. I've been at it 40 years and have almost 15,000 names in my file at http://www.perilloux.org/family/origin.htm Unfortunately, because of the French Revolution, WW1 and WW2, I was only able to trace my French ancestry back only to the early 1700s. Here is a photo from sometime before December 1877, taken with an unknown camera type. Looks like something out of the wild west, but it was in Louisiana.