More orange

Click for greater clarity.

As I wandered along the trail on August 19th at Hamilton Pool Preserve, not only did I see an orange butterfly, but also a bunch of orange-collared moths on some Eupatorium serotinum, a white-blossoming member of the same tribe, Eupatorieae, as the blue mistflower that was blooming nearby. From what I’ve found online, this kind of moth might be Cisseps fulvicollis; on the other hand, it looks like it could be Ctenucha virginica; but then again, it also resembles Acoloithus falsarius (except that in that species the orange collar is supposedly bisected by a strip of black). Entomologists, feel free to lend your expertise to, as Wikipedia likes to put it, disambiguate the situation.

For the technically minded: this moth kept moving around on the flowers, so I used a shutter speed of 1/500 sec. to stop the action. Because the insect was in almost constant motion, I didn’t have the luxury of taking time to align the camera’s focal plane with as much of the moth’s body as possible. Faced with that difficult situation, I kept my focus on the bright orange patch on the back of the moth’s head, knowing that other parts of its body wouldn’t be as sharp.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman