three bathing beauties

three bathing beauties

spreading their wings to the sun

warm gravel road

Another thunderstorm with torrential wind and rain in the morning. Up comes the sun and warms up all the rain, and the butterflies and moths flutter about, looking for a dry patch of ground to warm their fragile bodies. Walking to the mailbox, they keep flying up at my feet, flitting up and down and circling around me. I stop and wait patiently for them to settle down, hopefully within zoom range. It takes a lot of patience and breath holding to capture a few images. A couple of trucks pass by, disturbing my subjects so that I must wait and slowly stalk them again. I must look strange, standing on the road, with my camera pointed at what appears to be empty gravel road. The mostly black butterfly is a Black Swallowtail, a female, identified by the showy band of iridescent blue along the outer edge of her wings. She feeds on the nectar of purple clover, thistles and milkweed. The tiger-striped yellow butterfly is an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. This one is also a female, showing off her iridescent blue scales and orange marginal spot on her hind wings. She feeds on the nectar of lilac and wild cherry blossoms abundant here in late May and early June. The spotted orange butterfly also appears to be a swallowtail, but after an online search through the image gallery of Iowa butterflies that has taken me longer than the time it took to take the photos, I'm still not certain of its identity.