Meet My Friend, The Crazy Swallowtail!

Yesterday, after I had picked my sons up from school, I saw a girl enjoying this Western Tiger Swallowtail, the craziest and cutest butterfly ever. It was lavishing in the lantana for so long that I had time to retrieve my camera phone from the car, take these and about ten other pictures, which was not easily or speedily done given how tremendously windy it was. I would have had to have videotaped it to show you that it was also doing a thing from time to time, I think out of necessity to remain there, where it would just seem to be flying in place, giving the appearance that it was enjoying the wind in a fashion that reminded me of large birds which can be seen playing in crosscurrents on windy days. My children were impatient with me in the end for spending about fifteen minutes with this butterfly. People were walking by all the while and I ended up leaving before it did. I did not crop any photos, because I did not want to distort how close I was to this butterfly. (Click on pics to enlarge.)













This is cross posted at my new blog Landscape Fetish.