Out for a stroll between rainstorms this weekend, I came across this beautiful fellow catching some sun on a patch of yellow marsh-marigold.
It's a satyr comma. I don't know how this insect is anything like the man-goat hybrids that cavorted around the god Pan, but the comma name is for the white mark on his lower underwings.
This species hibernates as adults, emerging on warm days. I suppose that a good chunk of Saturday in Victoria qualified as a warm day. There were two of them in the Oak Bay Native Plant garden. I think they were both males. One reason I think this is that both had the same bright coloring. The other is that in between spells of basking in patches of sunlight, they would fly at each other, in a flurry of wing-beats, sometimes touching. It was probably quite a savage scene from a butterfly's perspective.
It's a satyr comma. I don't know how this insect is anything like the man-goat hybrids that cavorted around the god Pan, but the comma name is for the white mark on his lower underwings.
This species hibernates as adults, emerging on warm days. I suppose that a good chunk of Saturday in Victoria qualified as a warm day. There were two of them in the Oak Bay Native Plant garden. I think they were both males. One reason I think this is that both had the same bright coloring. The other is that in between spells of basking in patches of sunlight, they would fly at each other, in a flurry of wing-beats, sometimes touching. It was probably quite a savage scene from a butterfly's perspective.
