#289: Butterflies, Part One

Orangetips and two different hairstreaks

You could be forgiven for thinking I’m showing you yet another Sandia hairstreak nectaring on yet more three-leaf sumac, but you’d be only partially correct: this is actually a juniper hairstreak. The two hairstreaks do look a lot alike but, unlike a Sandia hairstreak, this butterfly has tails, those two little stringlike things hanging down from its hindwings.

Amazingly, I found the thicket hairstreak below on the same three-leaf sumac bush on the exact same day as I saw the juniper hairstreak.¹ Except for their coloring, thicket and juniper hairstreaks are also quite similar: both have tails, along with little orange quasi eye spots just above them.

The rest of the butterflies in this post are southwestern orangetips. I love, love, love orangetips, perhaps because they so frequently elude my eye (not to mention my camera). They don’t settle down nearly as often as hairstreaks, so I usually see them only when they’re flying. And my camera and I generally aren’t quick enough to get a decent focus on them while they’re in flight.

I seldom know whether a given butterfly is male or female; however, southwestern orangetips are one of the few butterfly species in which I can easily distinguish sex. A male is above — his wings have a bold orange which extends straight to the black border of their tips. The female is below.

Her wingtips have a somewhat weaker and yellower orange, and there’s a white margin between the orange and the black border. And sometimes (but not always, in my experience), a female orangetip’s hindwings are tinged with the pale yellow that appears on this butterfly.

Both male and female have beautifully marbled underwings. Most of the time, I was able to take photos of orangetips only while they were nectaring on tiny rockcress flowers like these. For some happy but unknown reason, I managed to get more usable photos of them this spring than in any other single year.

1. This particular three-leaf sumac bush is on the other (east) side of the mountains and is in full flower right now. The bush on the west side of the Sandias, of which I took so many photos earlier in the year, has completely leafed out already; its flowers are long gone.