Tiny Butterfly

I've been saying that it's been time for me to come back closer to home to do my hiking and nature watching. But I never said I couldn't come home and go farther away still. So I was right back out at Island Lake, which isn't very close to home, to explore nature and avoid evil bike riders.

I decided I wanted to get a closer look at a particular stretch of river that I check out sometimes. I thought an update for myself on the conditions there might be fun since I haven't walked that way the last several times I'd been there. I was rewarded with several things when I got to the edge of the river.

The first thing I saw was this tiny white butterfly that was flitting around. I noticed that it seemed to want to land nearby so I waited patiently for it to do exactly that. You can see above that I wasn't disappointed. This butterfly is actually about the same size as my thumbnail. It's much more beautiful that the naked eye shows.

I don't really know what the actual name of this butterfly is, mostly because I didn't look as hard as I could. But that's because finding the identities of butterflies online has not been easy for me yet. Someday it will be. I usually start out with a Google search, but all that really yielded was anything from pictures of horses to women in only their bras.

When I was looking at that crazy list of pictures and only seeing two white butterflies, I wondered why all of the others were on that list at all. I thought to myself that if my search was going to start out this bad I'd just end it now and post the pictures without a specific name. Google is usually much better than that.

How was that for a side adventure. Anyway, here is a backed off picture of the little butterfly. You can see that there are little clumps of small blades of grass that are much bigger than the butterfly. The big rocks that are embedded in the ground are only pebbles.

You might notice that backing up even this far makes the butterfly lose some of its beautiful detail. Backing up to the full length makes the creature only look like a white speck. Should I say that sometimes good things come in small packages? No, that would sound stupid. But I still did it, didn't I?

This butterfly was maybe the most beautiful of my sightings at the edge of that river, but it wasn't the only one, and it wasn't the strangest. The strangest is coming very soon.


Nature Center Magazine -Today's Cool Nature Video features Poison Dart Frogs.