longwing — 2017 — The 21st Century Matriarch

My husband and I signed up for the ‘Focus on Butterflies’ session last weekend. It’s a 2 hour time in the Wings of Fancy exhibit at Brookside Gardens before it opens to the public for the day….tripods allowed. It was quite an experience. We went in through an employee entrance at the side of the conservatory and entered the conservatory which was much warmer than outside. We quickly shed our jackets. The butterflies were very active and we immediately started taking pictures. I had a tripod and my monopod – ended up using the monopod the whole time. My Canon SX720 HS is light enough that the monopod works very well and had the added benefit of being a lot easier to move quickly.

I took over 400 pictures! I picked out the best when I got home and tried to group the ones of the same species together. Then I used the photographs I’d taken of the information board in the exhibit to try to identify the butterflies; it was a little difficult. I’ll do a better job of identification if I do another session later in the season. This time I prioritized magnified views of the heads and interesting features of wings.

The black and white butterfly was one of the first that I took. I was experimenting with how to get the clarity and magnification I wanted.

I took a picture of a blue morpho with its wings closed very early in the session not realizing what it was until later when I found one with a torn wing that was resting on a ledge…and was easy to photograph. Usually these butterflies are moving all the time and when they do sit they tend to show their ‘eyes’ rather than their blue wings.

An orange proboscis!

And orange tips on the antennae!

A Julia longwing with the distinctive arrowhead mark on the wing.

One of the volunteers for the session point out some Costa Rican clearwings. They are hard to see since they are small – and not colorful.

I always notice butterflies that have red – anywhere. These have streaks coming from the attachment site of the wing. The proboscis was very tightly coiled.

The Sara Longwing is metallic blue with two bands of white on the forewings. When I looked it up on Wikipedia I discovered that underneath it looks very much like the butterfly above with red streaks. Hmm…maybe those were Sara lacewings too.

There were two Atlas Moths that were in the same place the whole time we were in the conservatory. They do not have mouths and only live a few days.