It's been awhile since I posted any butterfly pictures, and given that I have been trying to shoot other animals (however badly) for Fran, I decided to give shooting the flutterbies the yard is attracting a whirl.

One of the reasons I'm getting daily chou (butterflies) is the sunny perennial garden in the citylawn.^[1]

This is not an especially exciting photograph, but it's the best shot I have with the wings half-opened, and since these are photo reference for me, I included it. As I mentioned in the intro, I saw two different males while shooting this series, and one in particular was fairly young, with only minor scratches on its wings—it looked nice and fresh.^[2]

I now have a decent collection of milkweed plants for monarchs to lay their eggs upon, but this lot are male, and more interested n nectar. What could be more classic than a monarch on the native echinacea?

Queen Anne's Lace—aka wild carrot—may not be a native, but the butterflies like it just the same. And this is my favourite picture of this lot.

I was actually surprised to see one on this half-curled up umbrel, as I would've assumed its nutritional value to be mostly gone at this point. And, in fact, if you click for the full size, you can clearly see the proboscis is curled up, so perhaps it's just resting a moment after being driven from its preferred food plants by large, lumbering mammals.

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Sylvus Tarn