easily spooked | Winged Beauty Butterflies

Viceroy Butterfly, photographed by Jeff Zablow in Kelso Swamp, Fayette Township, PA

Scrolling down our Media Library, I stopped when I reached these 3 images of a Viceroy Butterfly. I was in Kelso Swamp in Fayette Township in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Viceroys are easily spooked, meaning that if I try to get closer for a better image, this handsome Viceroy will go. Be gone.

That inviting blue sky, the Viceroy resting with wings fully extended, wings that were full, fresh and beautiful, made this image a keeper for me.

Looking at our celebrity butterfly here, during this stay at home thing, inspires me, much.

Viceroy gazing, is difficult to do, for finding a Viceroy when you’re far from a pond, creek or lake, and far from its chosen willow trees and shrubs . . . is a chance in 50,000.

Jeff

The Caper White Butterfly’s sharp whites and blacks reminded me of a gentleman, who is of the ‘1%’ and now in his tux and spiffy whites, has landed briefly at a fashionable bar in a fashionable hotel in a fashionable side of town. Other Anaphaeis Aurora sport slightly dated tuxes and slightly faded whites, but not our Caper White. He’s come to Binyamina to display his prowess and big-screen good looks.

Caper Whites are good subjects to photograph. When sipping on nectar from the Camphor weed, they pose briefly showing their left-side, then their right-side, and lastly, their dorsal wing surface. They might even show off their ventral (under) surface. Predictably, ten or so photographic exposures will be tolerated by the butterfly, and then it will shift position. It was a joy to capture not one, but two groups of exposures after chasing a whole bunch of Israeli butterflies (e.g., False Apollo, Plain Tiger and Large White) without a worthwhile image to show for it.

The population of Caper Whites in distant Ein Gedi was by comparison, very easily spooked and not easy to photograph. None of my Anaphaeis Aurora images down there at the Dead Sea warranted posting on this blog. So it goes.

Why then have we posted only males? The female butterflies were skittish. Nearly all left when I made my patented approach. Hmmm.

So here populations behave differently and gender behavior differed. Interesting?

Jeff