Hackberry Emperor

About the Hackberry Emperor

Wherever a hackberry grows in Texas - which is nearly everywhere - this butterfly lives. The Hackberry Emperor is wedded to that one scrubby, underappreciated tree: eggs, caterpillar, and chrysalis all happen on hackberry, and the adults rarely wander far from one.

The adults barely visit flowers. They take their meals instead from sap runs, fallen fruit, dung, and mud, and they are famously bold about landing on people to sip sweat - an emperor riding your shoulder down a summer trail is practically a Texas hiking tradition. That salt-seeking makes them absurdly easy to approach with a camera, or impossible, depending on whether the butterfly has decided you are the subject.

Males stake out sunny trunks and branch tips and dart at everything that passes - other butterflies, dragonflies, birds, thrown pebbles - in fast spiraling investigations before returning to the same perch.

Up close the wings are a rich study: warm brown patterned with dark eyespots and white flecks, and big pearl-and-black eyes. Caterpillars overwinter in rolled hackberry leaves, and the first warm weeks of spring wake both the tree and its butterfly together.