Saturday, May 26, 2007

Painted Lady of the Afternoon

Fernymoss was out working a bit and taking pics in the Woodland Garden on Friday and happened to catch this little beauty taking a break on one of the rocks in the front boulder bed. Though I can't remember the proper name for this species, the common name is Painted Lady, and we see quite a few of them around over the course of the spring and summer. They have fantastic markings on them, especially if you can catch them with their wings spred. Unfortunately this one took off before he could get such a shot, but this one is remarkable for the depth of focus and incredible detail you can see, right up the stripes on the antennae. Make sure you click the larger version. (Right click, open in new tab ... for Firefox users ... and if you haven't made the switch to Firefox yet, get yourself to Mozilla.com and get started! Nothing has so positively changed my internet browsing as moving over to Firefox, and it's a relief to finally be rid of MSIE! That was an uncompensated testimonial there, by the way!)

It's great to have the butterflies becoming more numerous of late, and I hope that's a good augur of things to come this summer in our garden. As more and more plants come into bloom, we should be able to bring more examples to Urban Oasis ... so keep stopping by. Summer has yet to arrive and Spring still has some surprises in store for the garden!

3 comments:

Larry Kollar said...

Wow, stripy antennae!!

Iowa Victory Gardener said...

Isn't she cool, FAR? While I was out weeding and planting a few things today, there was another painted lady who kept landing on my head and arms while I was weeding... guess she liked me! Also saw a Monarch feeding on some purple clover, but didn't have the camera at hand to catch it, alas. There will be plenty more still to come we hope and we'll get em!

olivia said...

I love those antennae too FAR ... it's amazing the detail we can see w/ the macro photos.

And LOL, I'm picturing Fernymoss having the cam so handy that it's part of the gardening tools. :)