Spend a few minutes in a flower bed or vegetable garden and you’ll almost certainly bump into an amazing parade of insects that will come crawling, buzzing, or winging past you.

One winged beauty, for example, that always catches my eye, is the eastern tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus).

The males have dazzlingly beautiful yellow and black “tiger stripes” on their forewings and wide black borders with yellow spots on their hindwings, while females come in two forms. One is yellow and black, like the male, but with more pronounced blue spots on their hindwings, while the other is black, with a single row of yellow and blue spots.

Both male and female eastern tiger swallowtails frequent gardens, parks, fields, streams, and deciduous forests throughout most of the eastern half of the U.S. and certainly lead a brief, action-packed life, miraculously transforming themselves from an egg, to larvae, to pupa, to an adult, all in the span of six to eight weeks. In fact, we still don’t fully understand how they do it.

Incredibly, only about one percent of eastern tiger swallowtails survive to adulthood. Why?

Many critters prey upon them. These include a frightening cast of assassin beetles, hornets, spiders, birds (like woodpeckers and cardinals), squirrels, raccoons, and opossums, including a deadly fungal bacterium.

Fortunately, through natural selection, developed over eons of time, eastern tiger swallowtails, who are key pollinators for many flowers, have developed some fascinating defense mechanisms.

For instance, the newly hatched brown and white-colored caterpillar of the eastern tiger swallowtail not only looks like a bird dropping but acts like one by sleeping out in the open, on top of the leaves during the day, seeming to say, “Look at me. I’m not edible,” rather than curling up underneath leaves.

Or, how about this deceptive maneuver. After the eastern tiger swallowtail caterpillar feeds on leaves, it clips the uneaten parts at the petioles, where the leaf joins the stem, letting them fall to the ground, thereby erasing any evidence that they’ve been feeding in the area, “possibly to reduce predation from birds that locate prey from damaged leaves,” according to the University of Florida’s website, “Featured Creatures.”

Two generations of eastern tiger swallowtails typically hatch per year, provided the weather is warm and their food plants (tulip trees, rose bushes, magnolia trees, wild black cherry trees, and chokeberry plants, to name a few, which they lay their eggs on) are healthy.

The first-generation hatches in mid-May to mid-June, and the second will start in August and finish in September, with the pupa or chrysalis overwintering.

Once the male eastern tiger swallowtail emerges from its chrysalis, then they have approximately two weeks in which to claim a postage stamp-size territory, about 40 X 50 feet, and mate (multiple times, if they’re lucky) before they die.

Meanwhile, female eastern tiger swallowtails get one chance. They hatch, nectar on flowers, and mate once, “locking up” with a male for about 20-60 minutes. Then the female uses her tiny feet as taste buds to find the right ash or wild cherry leaves, etc. on which to lay her brood of 75 to 100 eggs, before she dies.

Finally, I’m struck by a quote from Larry Weber in his book, “Butterflies of the North Woods.” To me, it sums up everything about butterflies, including eastern tiger swallowtails.

“Butterflies enjoy a unique position of love and acceptance. We eagerly invite them into our yards – unlike most other bugs – probably because they are beautifully-colored and often associated with flowers,” Weber writes.

Enjoy eastern tiger swallowtails. They’re amazing creatures.

Bill Hobbs is a contributing writer for both The Times and Estuary magazine and an avid observer of insects. He lives in Stonington and can be reached for comments at whobbs246@gmail.com.