Pearl Crescent Butterflies

     Pearl crescent butterflies are one of my favorite kinds of butterflies because they are petite, active, attractive and abundant, particularly in autumn as part of that season's many colors and beauties.  Pearl crescents have one and a half inch wing spans and their upper wings are basically orange with numerous chocolate markings.  And each one has a white crescent-moon marking on the margin under each back wing which gives this species its common name. 
     But I think this butterfly's greatest beauty and notoriety is in its big numbers in patches of flowering asters in pastures and fields and along roadsides in the eastern two-thirds of the United States early in October.  At that time, innumerable, five-foot-tall wild aster plants, each with many small, white flowers, bloom together in certain fields, making those human-made habitats look like snow fell only on them.  And the tiny pearl crescents, plus other kinds of butterflies, and bees and other types of insects swarm over those innumerable aster blossoms.  All those insects sipping nectar from aster blooms, and flying from blossom to blossom, are a lovely and interesting spectacle during the  beauties and unique characteristics of autumn.  They help make that pretty, intriguing season even more so.
     But pearl crescents are tied to asters more than as adult butterflies sipping nectar from the flowers of those plants.  Each female pearl crescent lays up to about 700 eggs on growing aster plants, which the resulting larvae eat.  Each female has to be a bit of a botanist to know which plants to lay her eggs on to nourish her offspring. 
     There are three generations of pearl crescents each growing season.  Each generation needs about six weeks to fulfill the four stages of complete metamorphosis, eggs, larvae, pupae and adults.  The first is from about mid-April to the middle of June, the second around late June to mid-August, and the last one runs from late August to early November. 
     The caterpillars are brown with cross-wise rows of spines on their upper bodies, which protect them from birds and other would-be predators.  Young larvae are gregarious, feeding in groups on aster plants.  But those caterpillars spread out as they get older, which is good because they are also much bigger and need to fan out to other asters to get greater amounts of food.  The last brood of caterpillars each year spends the winter in the ground, pupates there in the warmth of the next spring and emerges from the soil as mature butterflies around the middle of April.  That first generation of adults for the year are ready to sip nectar from various kinds of early-flowering plants, mate and lay eggs to start the next generation of the year.
     Pearl crescents are pretty, little butterflies that are most common in autumn after a couple of earlier broods, and most noticed, in abundance, on aster blossoms in October.  They are a lovely part of autumn each year.