How some of us cringe at the thought of traveling half-way around the world. I mean the packing, dash to the airport, the airport!, security’s distrust of You (although you’ve spent your life being loyal), the cramped airplane, with the usual impassive fellow fliers seated around you . . . . Now look at this cutie, nectaring on a thistle growing near a small village, on the slope of Israel’s Mt. Hermon. A Long-Tailed Blue (Lampides boeticus) patiently sipping the sugars energized by the sun of the desert that is the Middle East.

Imagine how I perked up when Robert Michael Pyle, in his Mariposa Road ( Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) stood with his wife Thea on Hawaii’s Kauai island, and “she spotted a long-tailed blue, a.k.a. bean butterfly (Lampides boeticus), gone to roost six feet up in tall grass . . . it was introduced from elsewhere; in its case, Asia.”

Whoa! Israel’s highest mountain and an island in Hawaii share the same blue butterfly? Teeny, tiny blues that somehow were transplanted from the Middle East/Asia to the verdant Hawaiian islands. And are thriving there. Yet another indication  that it’s almost time to consider pitching that rule book out the window.

Jeff