Spotted Eyes

Sometimes they look right at you and you don't know it at all. Is this butterfly looking at me? Maybe. Maybe not. But I at least got a good look at the butterfly. It was those magnetic eyes that drew me in. Those spotted eyes. Spotted?

Yup. They're almost too easy to see in most of my pictures today. I showed the top picture first so you could get a good look right into the face of a butterfly. Now this is what I call alien! We think of them as flying flowers, but what do you think of them after seeing that face?

Honestly, it's not really an unattractive face. It's just so very different from what we would expect from a human or most other mammals. It does have hair though. Hair is something you wouldn't expect from an insect, but a large amount of them have it.

I think most of us think of mammals when we think of hair. Reptiles don't have it. Birds are very close, but they have feathers. Amphibians? No hair either. What about fish? You already know that one. They do not have hair, but they have scales. Wait. So do many reptiles.

Scales and feathers, and many other types of coverings like that are thought to be in some way related to hair. So even with that alien face of a butterfly, they are a lot more like us than we think. We are all living things.

But enough of those random thoughts. The picture above is how the butterfly was when I was able to first get close to it. It flew from leaf to leaf,but it never felt the need to get too far away from me. I actually had to lift the camera over my head to get this shot. There were too many tall plants in the way.

And I was so surprised when I walked around those tall plants, and the butterfly was still there waiting for me. Oh sure, it had flown to another leaf, more than once! But there it was waiting for me there. How many times have you stood so close to a butterfly. They almost always fly away before you can get within more than a few paces.

And this butterfly wasn't alone! There was at least one other. But I was still able to walk around this butterfly to get pictures from almost any direction I liked. The only thing preventing me from all directions was the thick shrub it was sitting on.

It flew up into the air one more time, but still came back down to an accessible spot. I thought about getting a few more pictures of the butterfly with the spotted eyes, but I decided that it had been generous enough and it was time for me to move on. And so I left the butterfly with the spotted eyes in peace right where I found it.


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