about Mating Beauties

Why Mating Butterflies instead of simple butterfly photography like the picture just below..?
Why Mating Butterflies instead of simple butterfly photography..? Because of the aesthetic advantage of getting 2 members of the same species, sometimes even more, when there is competition, close up into 1 frame. More variety, more color and more detail.


A certain fun, for one thing. And the challenge, the hunting experience. Many amateurs, let alone pros, with fairly good equipment get excellent pictures of all kinds of butterflies from all kinds of places. One of the ambitions of a serious shooter has to be to stand out. Be it through technique (like on the Gallery Page with transformed or pushed colors) or subject matter. Or both...
Then there’s the aesthetic advantage of getting 2 members of the same species, sometimes even more, when there is competition, as HERE, close up into 1 frame. More variety, more color and more detail. In most cases there is only one spot for one individual on a given flower. Competition for nectar doesn't change the fact that feeding is pretty much a singular event. Of course, there are photo ops with plenty of the colorful insects on bushes with a multitude of nectarous providers. Then there are the well documented wintering trees...
In a moment of good Karma you might get to relive a nature episode, you had just read about... John Michael Pyle’s account of Monarch butterflies mating was still with me when I landed a scoop of sorts, one afternoon in early June 2000, while trying to photograph a flock of Goldfinches in the fields around Ellis Bay, Missouri, about 20 miles north of Saint Louis... Reading pages 2 & 3, and 248 of CHASING MONARCHS (Houghton Mifflin), by said author, one gets to appreciate how much I must have felt rewarded by coming upon a similar experience, one very close to his description... “Then he will fly straight up, carrying her in a postnuptial flight, while she remains closed and inert, into a tree." I had photographed them on the ground, barely visible through the meadow’s growth, and then was alert and privileged enough to not lose sight of the Mating Monarchs, from there to a branch in a nearby tree. Just view, at the bottom of this page, how the inside of the female’s wings resembles the “pale rags” that Pyle had so expressly observed.
Around the middle of Sept. 07 I took a series of photographs at the Bronx Botanical Garden where flowers and plants extended invitations to all kinds of insects, amongst them a few species of butterflies, mainly the Monarch Butterfly. See them at a click. Also at a click you might want to have a look at certain Predators of Bees..!
Image of a pair of mating Monarch butterflies in a meadow, close to the ground. Male looks fine, female has badly bruised wing edges, like "pale rags" in the words of John Michael Pyle in his book CHASING MONARCHS.