Category: Nature: Butterflies and Moths

Nature: Butterflies and Moths

Great Purple Hairstreak 细尾青小灰蝶 (Family Lycaenidae, Coppers, Blues and Hairstreaks)

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Suddenly you are aware of something strange on a nearby leaf, colors pulsating and changing in iridescent, metallic flashes like the flickering flames of copper sulfate. You are fortunate to be looking at a Great Purple Hairstreak, the possessor of the most wonderful color changes of any butterfly in America. One moment you see iridescent bluish-green, then royal purple, aquamarine blue, glints of violet and metallic green. This is because the butterfly is slowly moving its wings and each change in the angle of the sun hitting the prism-like cells of the wings creates a new symphony of wondrous color.

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Nature: Butterflies and Moths

Australian Butterfly 澳大利亚蝴蝶 (Family Pieridae 粉蝶科, Whites and Yellows)

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Along the rivers in the hot plains of Australia where the kangaroos rest in the shadows of the eucalyptus trees and the Kookaburra bird laughs like crazy above the water, the Australian Butterfly sometimes swarms in thousands. These brilliantly colored Pierids are related to our own common white and yellow butterflies that also swarm in great numbers across Iowland roads in summer. The swarming means that some thousands out of millions of eggs laid a couple of months before on the fresh green plants brought by the rains have now come to maturity. But, before they could become butterflies, many millions of caterpillars were eaten by furiously hunting birds. The butterflies themselves swarm forth over the land hunting for new places to lay their eggs where the ephemeral rainstorms of vast dry Australia bring a brief flowering of green life.

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Nature: Butterflies and Moths

Southern Wood Nymph 南方林仙蝶 (Family Satyridae, Wood Nymphs)

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The bright orange-brown patch on the underside of the forewing, marked with two large eyes, distinguished this butterfly. Swiftly it flies and dodges among thickets and light woods from Florida and the Gulf States north to New Jersey and Missouri. It grades into the Blue-eyed Grayling on the north, so that the two are probably actually one species. But the Southern Wood Nymph is the brighter colored of the two and its large eyes must be staring enough to frighten many a bird in some southern woodland.

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Nature: Butterflies and Moths

Blue-eyed Grayling 蓝眼灰蝶 (Satyridae, Family of Wood Nymphs)

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The graylings of wood nymphs flit softly through the shadows of the woods where their dark gray or brown colors make them hard to see. The two blue-eyed Grayling are more sharply blue than in other similar species, but there are so many color varieties that grade gradually into one another, it is often hard to tell them apart. The one shown in the picture is found mainly in the east from Virginia to Maine and Quebec, but other forms are found all over the country as far west as Oregon.

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Nature: Butterflies and Moths

The Mourning Cloak 丧服蝴蝶 (Family Nymphalidae, Brush-footed Butterflies)

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A cry of delight; a small boy running to his mother with the prize of royal purple and gold; a soft voice saying: “It’s a Mourning Cloak; let it go clear!” This is a delicious memory of a summer garden, as it is called in England, delights people over the major portion of three continents with its soft and distinctive beauty. A far northern form, the Boreal Mourning Cloak of Arctic America is noted for the bright reddish brown of its upper wings. Several strange looking and rare forms of the species have been destroyed.

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