Butterfly Hunter

So, I was swimming in the ocean yesterday, and along comes an orange butterfly. It was having a bit of a bad time of it really, doing tailspins and nosedives, landing in, and struggling to get out of the water. So I fished it out, good citizen that I am, and it sat quietly on my hand as I carried it over the beach and across the street. It was even able to muster the strength to crawl off my hand and onto a leaf unaided.

It was not a species that I was familiar with, so I looked it up - it was a comma. So you could say that it punctuated my swim.

Anyway.

I didn't have a camera available to snap the comma with, so today I decided to go on a butterfly hunt - not in the ocean, as you might think, but down to the marsh where the wildflowers are. It's not been a good summer for butterflies, but I hoped the hot weather had brought them out. Took a bit of patience (it was windy today), but in the end, in addition to the ubiquitous whites and sulphurs, I found monarchs, a tiger swallowtail (uncooperative), buckeyes (all rather ragged), a small blue and this pearl crescent fritillary. Not my best picture of the day, but seeing as this is a new species for me it won the vote.