White Admiral Butterfly

a familiar friend, still full of surprises!

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I was today years old when I learned that a White Admiral butterfly is a sucker for a ripe blackberry!

White Admirals, in my experience, are the olympic-gold-medalists of choosing challenging backgrounds.

No matter how fabulous your subject is in person, in your finished image, the background will affect how your subject comes across. It’s just a point of practical photographic reality.

The Background Matters

I constantly encounter White Admirals in the mud, in the gravel driveway, in the compost pile, working their ways through rotten apples. Sunning themselves on the truck tires. 🙄 It is literally at the point where I think they see me coming and just laugh.

But it’s not actually about me, of course. It’s just simply because, besides sap and nectar, they also feed on “decaying organic matter, and scat, as well as moisture from damp sand.” Wild Adirondacks

So, mainly, I just get photographically unlucky a lot, and find them in these other, less desirable feeding locations, instead of in some suitably magnificent wildflower field. But this year’s blackberries have turned out to be our magical common ground!

The blackberry canes are lovely this time of year, full and leafy, dotted with crops of red berries ripening to deep purple-black. Different angles set them against shadowy forest or dappled foliage or blue summer sky. Even a gravel driveway recedes into lovely, silvery light.

(This is my daughter’s first experience with White Admiral photography. No problem. Peekaboo angle. Soft background. She makes it look so easy. 🤣)

And the White Admirals have gathered daily on the berries, patiently discovering the juiciest overripe morsels, where they sit and sip contentedly, where they are easily approachable, where they really just will not be distracted from this delicious feast that I am so happy to share with them.

Now, if you’ve been following Nature Moments for a few episodes, you will probably not be surprised to hear that even though I’ve been admiring White Admiral butterflies for years here on the homestead, I noticed something completely new about them this summer. They are not all the same color.

It’s a bit of a running joke in my family about my favorite color. I constantly pick things out in all the shades of aqua and turquoise and teal. I actually really do like every amazing color that nature constantly puts on display all around me, but somehow, if I have to choose a t-shirt or a dish towel or a travel mug, it’s always going to fall somewhere in the turquoise spectrum. I can’t seem to help myself!

guess who picked out the paint color for the front door?🤣

The White Admiral butterfly is mostly black, with bold white stripes, and orange and blue pattern marks on the lower edges of its wings. The blue is typically a very morpho-like blue, very butterfly-appropriate. It’s that fantastic shimmer-blue that’s created by the shape of its scales, the physical marvel of a structural color rather than a pigment color.

But as it turns out, White Admirals are also known for some significant color variation. And here I was, standing in my gravel driveway, a pair of White Admirals drifting delicately about my feet, discovering that some are turquoise! Honestly, I wouldn't have believed my eyes, and would have dismissed it as some simple flicker of light or angle, combined with my constant affinity for that one specific color - but they kept landing right next to each other until the evidence was really indisputable! 🤣

I met a young turquoise butterfly back at the blackberries later. She appeared entirely fresh, a little small, not a trace of wear or tear or fade on her bright wings. She perched on a leaf as the sun grew late in the sky. I offered her a fingertip, and she climbed right onto it, gently exploring her surroundings with her proboscis before deciding I was undelicious and departing for a nearby berry.

Bill Davison, who writes Easy by Nature, observed in a recent note that our butterfly friends grow visibly worn over the course of the fast few weeks during which their adult journey intersects our daily lives.

Their wings fade in patches from loss of scales, become tattered and frayed from near misses or collisions. They wear the story of their lives on their wingtips, a story that is at once inspiring and wistful.

Is it strange to feel we’ve known them better, even in just a few short weeks, for having observed their passage from youth to age, having seen the marks and scars of life’s difficulties visibly materialize, written in graceful acceptance in butterfly scales?

It would be strange, perhaps, to feel otherwise. It would be strange to live and breathe, to watch the butterflies come and the butterflies go, and not to feel we’ve known them better. We’ve met them over blackberries, we’ve learned them by color, we’ve walked beside them over time, and grown richer for all the ways we’ve known them, after all. 🦋💙

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