All from the Butterfly house at Melbourne zoo, shot using the IR mod camera with a 590nm filter and 35mm lens. It’s mid winter in Australia at the moment, and even in a hothouse the butterflies were a little sparse and looking a little ratty. I quite like the tattered look.
A photobomberpillar?
This morning I was trying to capture an image of the mouthparts on this tiny 3-4mm monarch caterpillar, using my ridiculous new 4.5:1 lens, to see if I could. I’ve almost nearly figured out the flash settings needed, and this time almost almost had the minuscule in-focus zone right when some sort of bug started messing things up by moving around just in front of the lens. Pulling back a bit, it turned out we were being photobombed by a much faster and tinier lava of some different species. It seemed to just want to rear up in front of the front of the lens and wave about, firmly refusing to hold a pose long enough for a decent identifying photo.
Amusing, so long as the intruder doesn’t turn out to be the harbinger of some kind of swan plant mothy doom. I hope at least some of the new crop of monarchs make it to the butterfly stage this summer. Since I have this new lens and all.
Hey, what is this blurry fast blob that keeps getting in the way? Ah, that fellow.
20mm, F11, 1/100, iso 400
One of the things I most enjoy about my mirrorless camera is its ability to use (with a suitable adapter) just about any sort of lens – including the the kind bought of ebay for very small amounts of money. This is taken using a SMC Pentax-A zoom, 35-70mm, which is pretty much the kind of all purpose lens that would have been on any keen tourist’s film camera in the way-back-when. It’s capable of quite close focus, but with the addition of a couple of macro extension tubes it gets verrry close, to the point where you appreciate that a butterfly is a very 3D creature.
Look, an early monarch caterpillar, one of two hatchlings now munching through the remains of last year’s tattered swan plant. New plants have been now planted elsewhere in the garden; the trick will be to get balance twixt infestation and vegetation a bit more even this year. Roll on summer of the butterfly!
The last of the summer monarch butterflies escaped it’s chrysalis today, pictured here climbing up to a suitable branch as it starts to pump up rumpled wings. I’ve not noticed the crazy watermelon-pattern eyes before.
My two-shrub settlement’s worth of Monarch caterpillars have started to emerge as wonderfully gaudy Monarch Butterflies.
These late-season Monarchs will probably seek an overwintering place rather than breed now – and so live three times as long as their summer-born sibs.
If this was North America, they’d be flying thousands of kilometers to Mexico for the great (if threatened) butterfly migration, as in this dazzling footage. My internet research suggests that these will probably go no more than 20 kilometers to find a sheltered conifer tree. Even that seems a long journey for something as wind-tossable as a butterfly!
I’m enjoying the hungry little caterpillar scenario being played out on the swan plants (milkweed) in a pot at the end of my deck. The fattest wee beastie set off for a nearby fence today, to start the next phase of its existence.
They eat weed plants as caterpillars, and as adults, monarch butterflies (formally, Danaus plexippus) have no particular impact on anything human, except as objects of interest and beauty. Ideal royalty.
Swan Plant (milkweed) is bringing hungry bees to my garden at the moment, suggesting someone near by has an urban hive. The reason for the Swan plants, monarch caterpillars, are growing nicely, seeming to more or less double in size every few days. I anticipate much childlike happy wonder when they eventually cocoon and turn into butterflies.
During extensive research into the life cycle of these lovely creatures (ie, some careless reading on Wikipedia) I learnt that the original working title for The Very Hungry Caterpillar was “A Week with Willi Worm“. A rose by any other name . . . would probably not have succeeded quite so well.
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