Saturday...
Sitting in a camping chair set in the middle of a dirt road next to a cornfield surrounded by deep woods, I sipped on a tall rechargeable drink and watched the pretty butterflies as they flittered about. On my left large numbers of small yellow butterflies supped on the small yellow flowers that grew on vines that wrapped around the brown but still standing stalks of corn-less corn.
Their visits to the flowers were brief ; Slam, bam, thank you, Mam, but I was able to identify them as” little yellow sulphurs”
ariomma lisa ( the most common sulphur in the southeast) and noted that their bright coloration was identical with the color of the yellow flowers on which they fed. Now whose big idea was that, I wondered, the butterflies or the flowers? And I still wonder.
After mixing another drink I turned my attention to my right where a single white butterfly was being annoyingly indecisive, and took a long time flittering about before finally landing on a deep red wildflower nearby.
And then immediately disappeared.
Huh? I almost dropped my drink. How could a white butterfly land on a dark red flower, and just disappear? This I had to see.
Moving my chair to the bush must have disturbed the little creature because she sprang suddenly up into the air where she began again her indecisive coy-ed dance.
While I waited for the little dear to settle down I studied the flowers that she had, thus far, found to her favor. The six crimson petals on each flower measured about an inch long, each curving to a point. In the center was the nectar pods, or the pollen pods, depending on your point of view. No wonder the white beauty found these flowers so attractive, there were a dozen individual compartments in the center of the flower in an area about the size of a dime, a pod poker’s dream.
Maybe crime doesn’t pay but clean-living does, what good luck; as I studied the flower the butterfly returned to the flower that I was studying, and so I caught, first hand, her disappearing act. This is how it is done...
In one motion the butterfly lands at the center of the flower and folds her wings tightly behind her back and slips between the red petals to the back of the flower and then turns around and waits. After a short while she slips back to the face of the flower, but because her wings are tightly folded she offers only the slightest of profiles to any viewer who happens to be directly ahead, and for a viewer further away, she is invisible and so can turn clockwise while eating at her leisure without being eaten.
By turning my head to the side I could look at her underside as her wings were folded straight up. She was a beautiful “blue”, probably an Eastern Tailed -blue of the subfamily
Polyommatinae, the butterflies that so infatuated Vladimir Nabokov to the extent that he forgot Lolita and spent a large measure of the rest of his life chasing after blue butterflies in North and South America.
And now I too understand. If you, like me, had watched the seductive up and down motions of her hind wings, and seen first hand the sensual stroking of her antenna clubs as she circled around while supping sweet nectar, you would be seduced too.
