Dear Miss Sherry. I want tigers so bad! he is really beautiful. the funny thing about the color. I can tell you as an artist, yellow being the complement of purple it will usually bring out the purple in whatever it is next to or make it more obvious that it is not purple- I think the digital technology must get confused by this as well because I have tested mine with pure pigment and it will change the colors, weird. what I really want to know is how you uploaded your picture because I have been attempting to post a picture of a butterfly I can't find in any of the field guides or books. ( Audubon, stokes, etc) but even though the picture is smaller than 61 k it keeps rejecting it on size. I could e-mail it to you easier as It took me over an hour and I have gotten nowhere. thanks for your help, I have enjoyed every one of your postings. Though sickess has kept me down for awhile. Nean

Angie, I read somewhere that the black females are most common in the South. I used to see black gals almost all the time, and yellow females were rare, but since the hurricane (has anything been the same since then?) the yellow ones are showing up more often, still not as common as the black ones, but less rare. I think they're the prettiest, the yellow and blue look so good together. I don't see too many tiger eggs, probably because most are laid high up. Around here, if you want to see tiger swallowtails flying, just look up! Sherry

Sherry, Congrats on getting a yellow Tiger Swallowtail! That kind is most prevalent up here at my place, although since I started getting Pipevine Swallowtails here several years ago, I've also been seeing the black female form. I hope that you get to see many more of both the yellow form and the black form this year. I'll soon be getting ready to bring my pupas over from the outside building so I can keep an eye on them for eclosure. I have BST, Giants, and Pipevines. I'm really looking forward to digging in the garden this year and getting things ready for the beautiful butterflies. Cathy

They are plentiful here, now, too. I went out to the garden a little while ago with a ruler in hand. There were two tigers there, a male and the big yellow female. I measured the male first, because he was closer at hand, and he was 5" across, big enough. Most of the time, the female wouldn't hold her wings all the way open for more than a nanosecond, so it took me a while to measure her. She measured 6" across, and she is probably a little bigger, because her wings weren't totally open - I got tired of chasing her around the lantana. I'd guess her wing span to really be 6 1/4" - 6 1/2" - those tigers are impressive! Sherry