I am a sucker for butterfly stories. This one appeared in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post. It’s a first-hand account by the Post’s former Beijing bureau chief Dan Southerland about his chance encounter with a Red Admiral butterfly that hitched a ride on his shirt collar and spent the last several weeks living in his suburban D.C. garden. The butterfly would let Southerland approach closely, and even seemed to miss him when they were not able to see one another every day. Whether the butterfly died or started out on its southward migration for the winter, the writer cannot say (from the wing damage in the picture above, I’d guess the butterfly probably didn’t make it), but it’s a charming story. Here’s a picture of a Red Admiral in all its glory:
Red Admirals are not the only people-friendly butterflies. Butterfly habitats have become popular attractions for science museums and animal parks and zoos, and most of them feature the blue morpho butterfly, which is extremely people-friendly. (Insert shameless self-plug for my butterfly story from 2000 here)
You might remember that back in May we hatched a bunch of Painted Lady butterflies. I never did get a good picture of them, just this one picture of the chrysalises:
They all emerged from their chrysalises successfully, and we kept them in the big butterfly cage they came with for a couple of weeks before letting them go. Painted Ladies only live for three or four weeks and it did not seem fair to keep them cooped up for their entire lifecycle. One morning in June, Charlotte and I stood on the front steps and opened the door of the cage. I had to shake the cage a bit to get them to fly out, but they did eventually, one at a time. HarryHarryHarry watched with alert interest and tried to snag each one as it flew out, but they were too high for him to reach. Unlike Don Southerland’s friend, our butterflies showed no interest in maintaining a relationship at all and simply fluttered off.
