Labor Day jolted me into realizing I’d better share a few butterfly photos before summer is little more than a distant memory. Looking through the more than 25,000 photos I’ve taken this summer (!), I settled on a few orange butterflies — all of whose pictures I’ve taken within the past week, all within the Sandia mountains.
We begin with a monarch on a sunflower.1 I almost never see monarchs in the Sandias and, when I do, it’s usually in September.2 They often feed on milkweed, which makes them poisonous to many of their predators. Experts who know far more than I do speculate that other butterfly species have evolved to mimic the monarch’s orange coloring as a protective adaptation … even though most are not poisonous.
Like this comma, for example. Commas are closely related to another group of butterflies called question marks, which I have yet to come across in the wild.
See the little white mark on the comma’s underwing above? Imagine if it were turned in the opposite direction — it would look a lot like a comma, don’t you think? That’s how commas got their name. Question mark butterflies also have a dot near the comma, which is how they got their name.3
Last month I wrote a post which included a story about a butterfly which I originally thought was a painted lady. It was actually a west coast lady, and that experience shook me out of my complacency regarding painted ladies; I realized I couldn’t tell the difference between the two unless I picked up my camera and looked at them through a telephoto lens. Since then I’ve seen two more west coast ladies, both of which I originally thought were painted ladies. In my defense, they are quite similar: a west coast lady is above, while the butterfly below is a painted lady.
The painted ladies are out in force right now. I’ve seen virtual swarms of them within Albuquerque, as well as above 10,000 feet in the Sandias, over the last few days.4
I really, really love painted ladies’ underwings (above).
And I couldn’t resist taking head-on photos of the backlit painted lady on the coneflower above. The backlight created almost a double-exposure effect, which seemed to combine views of both its overwings and underwings.
I love it when I can see a butterfly’s proboscis rolled up.
It’s always reassuring to see the cycles of life continuing as they have in the past.
When I was first learning about butterflies, I spent a bunch of time at the Biopark’s butterfly pavilion. One day I took a photo of a butterfly that I couldn’t identify using the garden’s butterfly poster. I asked one of the people working there what kind it was. He said, “Well … that’s a question mark.” When I responded by saying, “They’re all question marks to me!” he very kindly explained that “question mark” was actually its name. I’m quite sure he had no doubts whatsoever about my level of knowledge (or lack thereof) after that.
Which may help to explain why I’ve already taken over 200 painted lady photos in September alone.
love the story of the BioPark experience!
so lovely to see such a variety of these exquisite butterflies. thanks Lisa!