BIG butterfly

Fairly early start this morning, walking upstream. My target was a new caterpillar that I spotted two days ago and again yesterday, but obviously it had no chance of making blip. It is nearly four inches long and is disguised as a stick and very difficult to spot, but now I have seen it, I am finding lots of them. Unfortunately, not today. It very soon became obvious that once again the caterpillar was not going to make blip anyway.

Once again the blip monster delivered to me a cornucopia of exotic insects, the crowning glory being this very large butterfly, one of the arboreal butterflies that I have been after for months. In fact, I even got a half decent shot of it's mate. This was shot from about five feet away and yet it was still a blippable sized image.

The blip material was coming thick and fast, so I decided to stay an extra hour and ended up with 22 different subjects to choose from aside from the ones that didn't make the final cut. Still, the choice for blip was very easy. I have put the best 15 of the rest in folio for your perusal. Each of them could easily have made blip on another day.

The miss of the day was a kingfisher type bird with such glorious metallic colors. It flew over the lily pond, skimmed the water, landed on a protruding branch for a second and then was gone. I cranked up the ISO, pre-focused on the branch, sat down and waited. It was never going to be a classy shot from about 20ft so I abandoned the idea after about fifteen minutes. If I had a long lens, I would be camped by the pond every day. Next time baby! Kudos to the bird blippers who regularly turn out class bird shots almost daily.

Well, it is going to be a while before this smile wears off!

Update - Asian SwallowTail - Papilio Lowi

Dave