The past couple times I’ve been out with my camera, I’ve seen lots of butterflies and dragonflies. The good news is, there are lots of colorful, charismatic large insects out and about. The bad news is, they don’t like to have their pictures taken. Some of what I’m about to share is pretty blurry, so bear with it.
Above is a side view of a Red Admiral. I don’t think I’d seen one before this year, which is crazy, because I’ve seen several this year, and they reportedly are fairly-very common. They are flighty, though, and here is the best picture I have of the upper wings:
Red Admirals lay eggs on various kinds of nettles. They like to live near wetland areas, so maybe that’s why they weren’t around last year, when it was unusually dry, but have been around this year, which was a wet spring and early summer.
I’d been hoping to see this butterfly, called a California Sister, for a couple years. The reason is, I’ve seen many Lorquin’s Admiral butterflies, and the CA Sister is a doppelgänger for Lorquin’s. The difference is the large patches of orange at the tips of the wings. I’ll show a small photo of the Lorquin’s below so you can see the difference:
I’ve also seen some all-yellow butterflies and a pretty Comma butterfly (they have that punctuation mark in white on their underwings), but have not been able to get even a blurry picture of them. I hope to get back out there soon and net some photos!
Cheers.
Ticklehead 