Rejuvenating the butterfly, at least pictorially

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The white-striped longtail butterfly that you saw last time was faded and had lost its long tails. For comparison, from the April 12th outing in south Austin that brought you several recent pictures of old plainsman, I can offer you this fresher Chioides catillus on a prairie verbena, Glandularia bipinnatifida. Central Texas marks the northern fringe of the territory of this butterfly, which I was surprised to learn ranges all the way south to Argentina; imagine someone down there looking at the same species as someone up here. (That got me wondering about the name of this butterfly in Spanish, so I did some searching and found a site from Argentina that referred to it as coludo chaqeuño; that means ‘a tailed [butterfly] from el Gran Chaco,’ which is a region that includes parts of Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina. In a Mexican book I found the butterfly called coluda catillus, a combination of a common name and a scientific name.)

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman