Wellfleet Bay firsts 4/21 and butterfly garden redo

[Mark Faherty]

My first (and still only) butterflies of the year were on Saturday, 4/21, at Wellfleet Bay wildlife sanctuary:

2 Brown Elfins
1 Spring Azure

Marshall Iliff also reported a Red Admiral here on 4/14.

We are redoing the butterfly/pollinator garden here at the sanctuary from scratch (it's currently down to bare soil), and the plant list has been a fun thing for me to obsess about. More on this later. Wish us luck.

Other than my own years of observing plant/insect interactions, some of my favorite sources of information as I research plants have been Bill and Joe's excellent article on the Mass Butterfly Club website:
http://www.naba.org/chapters/nabambc/downloads/Butterfly%20gardening%20101%20-%20Western%20Massachusetts.pdf

This great site:
http://www.capecodwoodlandgarden.com/plants/

This handy table from the Wild Seed project in Maine that organizes everything by bloom time and light and soil regimes:
https://shop.wildseedproject.net/#seedtable

And the book "Native Plants for New England Gardens" by the NEWFS folks. An excellent book, though it doesn't get into insects much.

Mark Faherty
Mass Audubon/Wellfleet Bay