Last Fall was when I first took a photo of a butterfly here. It had the sunlight showing through the wings and I thought I'd never seen anything so pretty- and I had taken the photo! I wanted to be able to name my butterfly so I searched the internet until I found that it was an Orange Sulphur, Colias eurytheme.
Why was it important to know the taxonomy of the insect? Because I wanted to make a collection and have them in the right files so I could collate the photos and know where they were.All of these photos were taken with a Niken CoolPix, either 3MP 885 or 5MP. All hand held and without any extra lenses or filters.
No butterflies were harmed in the taking of these photos.
If you want to see a slide show of all 32 butterflies to date go here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/donpbk/DonnaSButterflyCollection02#
What I want to do is to show some of the interesting aspects of these butterflies, especially how some of them are similar- and yet different.
These two ladies are perfect examples of butterflies that are commonly mistaken for one another. At first glance I thought they were the same butterfly, but after looking at a lot of online references I learned how to tell them apart. It is easy once you know what to look for. There are two distinguishing characteristics:
1.) The Painted Lady has no 'eyes' on her bottom wings, and the American Lady does.
2.) The American Lady has a small white spot on the top wing in the first orange cell below the black area, and this is missing in the Painted Lady.
These two members of royalty are often found together but are easy to tell apart if you know what to look for.
1.) Notice that the Hackberry Emperor has white spots on the top wing, but the Tawney Emperor has light beige spots.
2.) The Hackberry also has a big eye on the top wing, which is missing on the Tawney.
Until I started really looking at butterflies I would never have thought that these were in any way different. I don't have a top view of the Viceroy, and indeed this is the only time I ever saw one, but the top view is very similar.
1.) Look at the white spots in the black margins- Monarch has two rows of white dots and the Viceroy has just one row.
2.) The Viceroy also has a distinctive black line going across the lower wings which is not found on the Monarch.
These butterflies look a lot alike except for their coloration. When I first spotted the pinkish color on the Mangrove/Tropical Buckeye I thought my eyes were deceiving me. I saw it twice though, so I know it is real.
There are two butterflies that look alike that could fill the bill for this new Buckeye variation. Since they are so close I'm going to show a good example of each of them here:
(I did not take nor identify these images)
