Well, it rained all last night and it's in the 60's outside so it wasn't a great day for butterflies. But I still took pictures of what I could.
Atala - released a few of these today. My 12 year-old buddy, Dominic, stopped by and helped.
I released a bunch of Malachites, too.
Zebra Longwings roosting. Dominic didn't know they are one of the few butterflies that roost together so I taught him something new.
In the shade house, Dominic spotted a Gulf Frit and since it was so cold and no sun, he easily caught him. This is me trying to get it to pose in the flight cage.
This Cloudless Sulphur is hanging on the top like, "Where did the sun go?" We do have a heat lamp in the flight cage and I turned it on to help warm the place up. It also keeps us from losing too many butterflies when we have nights in the 20's or 30's.
This Monarch looks like he got rained on! Butterflies are okay if they get a little wet. The problem I've read is when they get wet and then the temps get down to freezing, it creates ice crystals in their wings and they can't fly and die. This happens even at their overwintering grounds in Mexico.
Only a few Julias in the flight cage but plenty of caterpillars in the lab.
I saw this one White Peacock on the wall and then released another one. Hopefully, they're different genders.
And you know I've been taking pictures of the Imperial Moth cats each week. They don't seem much bigger than last week but they do seem to have more detail. Or maybe I just took a better photo?
Speaking of photos...Melanie bought herself a Christmas present! I've been talking about a new camera for a while now. I've been using a Sony Cybershot DSC-H20 and I bought it mostly because I loved the pictures another user was taking on Dave's old site. But the camera is pretty old and I wanted to upgrade. So I started reading and apparently Sony has a camera that is supposed to be as close as you can get to an SLR camera but still be able to put it in your pocket and not have to worry about all those settings and attachments. Because as much as I love talking photos of stuff, I don't actually like photography. I mean, I don't actually want to learn what all those terms and settings mean. I just want to point and shoot. So I bought a Sony DSC-RX100. Amazon says it will be here between this week and forever so I'll let you guys know when it arrives and we'll see how long it takes me to figure out how to use it! Then, we can see if it's better (I hope so)!
