A Swallowtail on the Wing

Between the birds, a bit of drifting color. Swallowtails are the big kites of the butterfly world — broad-winged, unhurried, and impossible to ignore when one comes tumbling through on a summer afternoon.

They take their name from the slender tails trailing off the hind wings, and those tails may be more than ornament: many researchers think they work as a decoy — a false “head” at the wrong end, so a striking bird takes a harmless bite of trailing wing instead of the real thing. Our most common local swallowtail is the Western Tiger, the lemon-and-black one that drifts through Portland gardens all summer long.

An adult swallowtail lives only a week or two, and spends nearly all of it nectaring, patrolling, and searching for a mate — a great deal of beauty packed into a very short window. Always worth stopping for.