Protographium Marcellus

April's tentative, tender greenery, like screening, given tons of rain, is now vivid and definite May green, so encompassing that while walking some packages over to my neighbor I couldn't think outside of it and couldn't stop smiling -- and then along came an airborne smile. Wowee -- pale blue with black stripes. The year's first Zebra Swallowtail (Protographium marcellus).

They're butterflies of the American Southeast, active all summer, breeding about three times a season, and in Missouri most common in the southeastern quarter of the state.

A nature photographer I once took a class with said, "When a butterfly or insect flutters away, stay where you are because it'll be back." This is true. The first time, this swallowtail flew rings around me and didn't land, so I couldn't get a picture. Then it came back and unfolded itself on the gravel as if it were modeling. Perhaps word has got around the insect community that I take great glamour shots and then put them online, and to them it's like posing for Avedon.

Paying Attention

While lying on the dismal oatmeal-grey carpet, I glimpsed a bit of orange and saw it was a moth. A tiny, tiny orange moth! With lacy wings! Unique! I scooped up the body with a sheet of white paper and marveled. Then I attached my macro lens to my phone and photographed close-ups. What a magnificent work of art: red, orange, and bridal white. For scale, the wooden item you see in the photo below isn't the tip of a chopstick; it's the tip of a round toothpick.

The Design is Perfect

All I found was one moth wing. I carried it into the house and folded it into a piece of paper until I had time to study it. Its owner was a Cecropia moth. I especially loved the transparent porthole "lens" in the center of the wing's "eye" that prevented the wing from being a total blind spot and was designed to look to some predatory creature like a hungry snake's or owl's eye. Here you see the wing's obverse and reverse.

Cecropia moths live only to reproduce. They don't eat; they don't have mouth parts. They live two weeks. I would like to know and feel what its life was like. Is it possible that we who are much more complicated creatures do know or can know? Could I ever articulate it?

The wing is furred, colorful, beautifully shaped, functional, and despite its delicacy isn't fragile because it survived its owner and two weeks out on the porch. I'm so glad I found it. It's a reminder that nature's design, behind it all, is perfect. We simply have a blind spot about our own perfection.

Taken for Granted

It looked like a festival: Black swallowtails in the ironweed! Five or six elegant Papilio polyxenes  flying around, alighting, three or four on the same flower head, raising and lowering their blue-tinged wings. I ran for my camera. Of the 60 photos I took, none captured the spirit. Determined to get a photo of not just one butterfly but a bunch, I marched back to the meadow and clicked and tweaked and refocused as butterflies flew out of the frame as if teasing me, or vanished, or landed on other plants. Darn! Well, I was just going to stand there until I got my picture! I wanted that picture!

And then God said to me, "You will get that picture when I grant it."

Oh, I said, and relaxed. And took 219 pictures. Here is the one I think does it.

I guess I will get what I want when God grants it.

Lord of the Butterflies

The landlord forbade me to garden, allowing only the raising of vegetables in containers, because he wants the 100 acres to remain completely natural, and I understand that. So I planted native coneflowers nobody can ever object to, and every type of flying creature loves them, from the nectar-sucking Great Spangled Fritillary, lord of the butterflies, who came by today, to the seed-eating goldfinches who pick the sliver-like black seeds from the dry flower heads in autumn. I enjoy the challenge of taking a photo I've never taken before.

My camera is Nikon Coolpix 8400, a 2005-era hobby camera with great optics, excellent for closeup photos; this photo was taken on its "Portrait" setting. I used to have analog SLRs, with macro and telephoto lenses, etc., and I used to buy bulk film and "roll my own" cartridges in the dark, and develop my own photos, and specialize in architectural photography -- but carrying 12 pounds of camera around my neck isn't as appealing as it used to be. Like my friend here I prefer to travel light.

Friend With Roots, Friend With Wings

The most gorgeous butterfly in the area, The Great Spangled Fritillary with its orange and black-coffee-colored wings on one side and coffee-and-cream with "eyes" and ruffles on the other, came to visit my young tomato plant yesterday. Butterflies began floating around here in March, about six weeks early, but seem to have flourished.