The Wild Blue Lupine Flower

Source: Photo by USFWS; Joel Trick

The Wild Blue Lupine flower belongs to the family of legumes. It is a is a perennial flower found much in the eastern United States.It is a popular ornamental plant in gardens. Regarding the color of the flowers, they are typically blue, but can also be white, shades of purple, violet. Occasionally they can be pink. They have 5 petals.The small (1-2½'' tall) bell-shaped flowers grow on a spike. The flower stalks are about 5 inches long. They have long, slender green leaves arranged in a whorl. The palmately compound leaves have 7-11 leaflets. The stems are light to reddish green and canescent-hairy.The plant can grow up to 2 feet tall.The seed pods are elongated and up to 2 inches long. Each pod contains on an average 15 seeds. As the pods dry, they twist and eventually pop open, shooting seeds in all directions. If you are in a patch of wild blue lupine when the seeds are drying you can hear the pods exploding.  They will sometimes pop open in your hands if you are collecting the seeds.

The plant was once thought to deplete or wolf the mineral content of the soil; hence the genus name derived from the Latin lupus (wolf). Quite contrarily, the plant and the family Fabaceae enhances soil fertility by fixing atmospheric nitrogen.

Blue lupine is the lone host plant for a little butterfly called the Karner Blue, an endangered species. The leaves of the wild lupine are its sole food. Habitat loss has led to the decline in plants, and put the Karner Blue on the endangered species list.When these larvae emerge in the spring they eat lupine leaves. The butterfly disappeared from Ohio when the lupines numbers start depleting.

All parts of the wild lupine flower are poisonous to humans, pets, horses and other livestock. 

The best place to see wild blue lupine flowers is at Kitty Todd Preserve. The annual Blue Weekend at Kitty Todd is a celebration of blue lupine and the Karner Blue Butterfly. 

The beautiful Karner blue butterfly.

This beautiful karner blue butterfly is an endangered species. The habitat of this small butterfly is in oak savannas and pine barren in  New Hampshire, where the wild lupine occurs,  wild lupine is a small attractive flower plant. The Karner blue butterfly is  wide spread in  Wisconsin and also found in New York, Canada, Michigan, Minnesota and Indiana.

Source: Photo Credit USFWS

The male and the female ones of this one inch-wingspan butterfly can be identified by the difference in their appearances. The male butterfly has silvery or dark blue wings with a black narrow border & the female has greyish brown ones.

The Karner blue butterfly usually breeds twice a year. The Karner blue rarely ventures more than 300-600 feet from its hatching place. Blue caterpillars' sole food is the wild lupine plant. Adults feed on the nectar of flowering plants. When the Karner butterfly emerges, it expands its wings and dries them for about 45 minutes

The Karner blue was first identified in 1861 in Karner, New York. The karner  blue butterfly is the state butterfly of New Hampshire and it is found in the Concord pine barrens in East Concord.

The Karner blue butterfly was  listed as an "Endangered species" by the U.S. government in 1992.

Mandrill

Mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx)

One of the primates of the old world monkey family is the Mandrill. These are the largest of all monkeys. it is closely related to the baboon. it is found in the tropical rainforests of equatorial (western central) Africa.

Appearance

It is the most colourful monkey. it has a hairless face. It has an olive green or dark grey pelage with yellow and black bands and a white belly. They have extremely long canine teeth used for self-defense mainly.it has an elongated muzzle with distinctive characteristics such as a red stripe down the middle and protruding blue ridges on the sides. It also has red nostrils and lips, a yellow beard and white tuffs. The areas around the genitals and the anus are multi-colored, being colored red, pink, blue, scarlet, and purple.The coloration of the animal is more pronounced in dominant adult males.The mandrill has one of the greatest sexual dimorphisms among the primates.

Food

It is an omnivore. It prefers fruits but also eats leaves, stem, bark,etc. It also consumes mushrooms and soil.

Other Facts

• Mandrills live in troops, which are headed by a dominant male and include a dozen or more females and young. They also gather in multi-male/multi-female groups that can include some 200 individuals.Mandrills are sociable animals and inhabit areas of forest in large groups known as a troop.The mandrill troop primarily includes female mandrills and their young who are led by a single dominant male mandrill.
• Its lifespan is about 25 years.
• Due to their large size, mandrills have few predators in their natural environment. The leopard is the main predator of the mandrill.
•  Mandrillus sphinx is a threatened species.

Puerto Rican Parrot

                 The Puerto Rican Parrot (Amazona vittata) is a critically endangered bird. This USA's only  living native parrot species is one of the ten most endangered birds in the world. It may be (possibly) the world’s rarest wild parrot. The accusing finger is pointing towards global climate change.

The bird was declared federally endangered in 1967, and by 1975 just 13 individual parrots occupied a patch of rainforest habitat in the Caribbean National Forest. The species is the only remaining native parrot in Puerto Rico and has been listed as critically endangered by the World Conservation Union since 1994.

Puerto Rico is an island that is away from mainstream American culture. Rivers are drying out and hence plants and animals are facing extinction. If the levels of pollution continue to rise, it is  possible that Puerto Rico’s island paradise can become a wasteland in just a matter of years.Pollution has attacked the aquatic ecosystem directly by diminishing the levels of plankton that once thrived superfluously in Puerto Rico’s crystalline water. The root cause of the problem is the ongoing production of waste created by factories. Economic growth is also responsible for driving a lot of the island’s creature on the border of extinction.
By the mid 1970's only a handful of individuals were thought to remain.Captive breeding programs in Rio Abajo and El Yunque and the release of these birds have had some success, but the number of these birds in the wild is still very low.



The first sequence of this large Neotropical Amazona bird, A. vittata, has been published by a genomic sequencing project in BioMed Central and BGI's open access journal GigaScience on Sept. 28 2012.


The Parrot is quite large, about a foot-long. it has a red forehead with thick white eye-rings, flesh-colored bill and feet. It reproduces annually. the female lays eggs and incubates them till they hatch. the chicks receive both motherly and fatherly love. Both males and females have predominantly green plumage, though their feathers have blue edges. The juvenile birds have plumage similar to adults. The primary flight feathers of the wings and the main covert feathers are dark blue. The color of the feathers on the underside varies depending on the body part: the feathers on the underside of the wings, which can be seen during flight, are bright blue; those in the tail have yellow-green tone.