ann 🦋

Alexandra

Bullyrazzis

do it for you and not for them 

xx

A small snippet of behind the scenes and an excuse to nerd out momentarily.  As many of you know, especially those of you who have been around here a long while… we scavenge majority of our materials. From beads to bones, from findings to insects…. and because of that, many pieces of ours have an eclectic background.  I suppose this is following the foot steps of my last rambling post, but hey… maybe this will inspire you to look in odd places for salvaged natural treasures?   SO here are some recent favorites we’ve collected over the past few months.  Take a look at this tiny little fluff of orange. 

These are called skippers, a kind of butterfly that ( if i recall correctly) have 3,000 species to their name. My amateur naturalist self would like to claim these little fuzz balls specifically as woodland skippers but that is up for debate.  Ranging between  25–32 mm ( how flipping cute) these little brush faeries are all over the place in southern oregon, sporadically flying about in the foliage.  These skippers do not fly fluently like most of their butterfly brethren, instead their flight patterns are loopy and spiraling giving them the similar movements of falling leaves ( as if they couldn’t get cuter)  They contain traits for both a moth and a butterfly. Hairy stocky bodies like that of the moth and antennae knobs like a butterfly, though the wings are where it gets interesting. Their resting wings are both up like a butterfly and flat like a moth….. hind wings lay flat while the fore-wings rest upright.  I found a good 20+ of these this last summer while visiting outside Jacksonville Oregon.Walking  through a lovely hillside green house, i started to notice little splashes of orange tucked away in corners and crevices… only to find out that those splashes of color were little dead butterflies.  Unsure if they got stuck in the green house and didnt know how to escape or if they met their death due to a short life cycle…. either scenario left me compelled to collect some and learn about them. 

Moving along….  Bryan and i were driving out to central oregon and upon passing through a small … very very small town, i started to notice all these “things” strewn about in the middle of the roads.  The more i stared, the more i realized they were dead bugs of some kind.  We pulled over for a leg stretching break and being the 28 year old child i am…. i ran out through the road to investigate these “things”.  They were dead butterflies….. we passed hundreds of them on they way and after stepping out of the car we found at least 15 within 10 feet. 

They have a purple grayish marbled tone to their under wings and a bright orange and black on the tops.  Yet again, i excitedly scrambled to gently collect all the butterflies i could within the few moments we were stopped.  These beauties are called the California tortoise shell butterfly. 

I was left to wonder why on earth there were tons of these butterflies littering the roads for miles and miles. Perhaps a large migration was flying through the roadways and fell casualty to oncoming cars/traffic? Pesticides on nearby plants? or just naturally meeting the end of their life cycle? 

None the less they are beautiful beautiful creatures that can be found all over the place, oregon, montana, new mexico… michgan to name a few.  Such amazing patterns in the wings <3  Last but not least….  cicadas <3  I discovered these beauties a long ass time ago from a customer who decided to stick a couple within a trade package.  These of course do not look like what you would imagine a typical cicada looks like… no wings, no strange eye balls and about a 3rd the size.  These strange alien looking beauties are cicada molts… this is the late nymph stage , one step before turning into a full winged adult. 

They climb up on bark, blades of grass, wire fences etc to finally shed their late nymph skins,when they have fully emerged… and when they are done, you have a fully intact molt left.  Their life is simple, an egg hatches which produces an early nymph, the early nymph grows and matures to a late nymph…. and a late nymph grows and matures to molt and produce a winged adult….  Mate rinse and repeat.  simple.  While on a visit to southern oregon a few years back, My husband had found a molt and gifted it to me ( because hes awesome<3) Realizing we were somewhere that cicadas thrived, ended up planting the seed that i should discover them.  and discover them i did….  hiking through a  madrone forest i saw one hanging to a piece of peeling bark… then another…. and another, until suddenly i saw them ALL.  Cicadas were everywhere, high on the madrones trunk bark all the way down to the sparse blades of grass…..hundreds of molts hidden in plain sight. 

So it became a yearly ritual to collect molts whenever we visited in the summer.  These specific molts are called Robinsons annual cicada due to them coming out every year. There are many other species of cicada including the more popular periodical cicadas that come out every seventeen years or so.  Nice thing about the Robinsons cicadas is that you know they will be there to sing and greet you every summer <3 

Look at those little claws!