Butterfly Valentine's

Slightly overcast skies made for an as close-to-perfect as it gets day for Houston lunchtime running weather in August. Plants and bugs were quite happy with yesterday's soaking rains. There was an actual breeze and no blazing sun! I thought I was just going for a pleasant run outside, but I was in for a surprise from my butterfly friends.

Bees, dragonflies and butterflies were everywhere. A couple of them actually collided with me today.

About a third of the way into my run I spot a couple of beautiful orange gulf fritillary butterflies playing around. I stop to watch for a bit as one of them hugs a tall grass and jut sits there. The other one continues to flutter around it, like a mating dance some birds will do. It flutters seemingly with no response by his friend in the grass stem, or so I thought. I wait to see how things would end up and then the most amazing thing happened.

The courting butterfly comes down and gives her friend a tender "kiss" that lasts a couple of seconds or so. And they go their separate ways. But for those two seconds, the couple becomes one. They almost perfectly mirror each other producing an image as you'd see in a child's drawing of a butterfly with it's wings wide open and full of color. Incredibly beautiful.

And then again, another unbelievable scene happened as I was finishing the run. I see a pair of black tiger swallow tails also in a courting dance. One is black with strong yellow spots and the other has an additional blue tint to the top of its wings. They are different just enough to characterize male/female.

I stop to watch them flirting and fluttering around each other. They fly across the path, down to the bottom of the levee, still playing around one another. Then they start flying higher and higher and higher. They must have caught a pretty good draft. I keep watching and eventually loose sight of them in the bright sky overhead. I don't remember ever seeing butterflies fly that high up! I guess they do! Learning something new...




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Swallowtail

http://creatures.ifas.ufl.edu/bfly/tiger_swallowtail.htm (Black form)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Fritillary