Monday, August 22, 2022

Licking Your Food

 ... is perfectly acceptable if you're a butterfly.

7 comments:

Ilíon said...

I saw a small moth or butterfly the other day (of course, it was long gone before I could get a camera) which looked like a fighter jet. I mean, it has delta shaped wings horizontally out to the sides, and also two small vertical wings closer to the body.

tim eisele said...

Is there some sort of social stigma against licking your food? If so, that could explain a few things . . .

This looks like a different species from the swallowtail you posted back in July. This one looks like the Western Giant Swallowtail, Papilio rumiko.

https://bugguide.net/node/view/1028443

The odd thing is, while it is called a "giant swallowtail", BugGuide doesn't say how big they actually are. Would you say that this was a particularly "giant" butterfly?

It does say that their caterpillars eat citrus leaves (and related, mostly semitropical plants), which I guess would explain why we never see these butterflies up here.

K T Cat said...

Tim, it was indeed a really big butterfly. About as big as mu hand with the fingers spread.

Ilion, isn't that always the case? As they say, the best camera you own is the one you have with you. I've got a Pixel 6 and its camera is really quite good. That's what I used to capture this beauty.

K T Cat said...

Also, thanks for the ID, Tim!

tim eisele said...

Ilion: Was it anything like these? They rest with their wings pretty much like you describe.

https://bugguide.net/node/view/3252/bgimage

Ilíon said...

Tim, a couple of those pictures are exactly what it looked like.

K T Cat said...

Tim, we get those all the time, too!