Chuck,

Nice to see some of my bugs again!

FYI, The Scott County specimens are from a dirt road, County road 721. The label looks like it is saying 721' (if I'm seeing it right in the photo).
Actual elevation there, and with the Abrams Falls specimens, is around 1200-1400'.

Cheers,
jh

Chuck,

Have you read Partick Matthews' "The Pursuit of Moths and Butterflies" (London, Chatto & Windus, 1957)? On p. 13 he relates the following:

"Mr. Chorlton, having colleccted all his life, loses his collection in the war. The old man says 'You know, it sounds worse than it is. If I had ...

Apparently almost no book published these days is actually edited. They seem to be full of errors -- most frequently incorrect homonyms. I suspect that a computer is doing the 'editing' and no educated person ever checks it - or cares. I try to read mostly pre-1990 books.

And don't get me started ...

Butterfly houses always give me a mild case of vertigo. It unsettles me to see Neotropical and SE Asian species flying together!

jh

Lord, that's a depressing post, Chuck. You'd better start collecting again as soon as possible when you move!
jh

I have once or twice seen a Troides sp. in the flight cage at the McGuire Center, Gainesville, FL... but not every time I've visited. Never noticed an Ornithoptera sp. there, though.
jh

Does xuthus still fly on Hawaii? I seem to recall that it had established there several decades ago.

jh

Chuck wrote: Sat Mar 08, 2025 2:21 am JHyatt IIRC Adam said in the Marcellus thread that any flight can become any of the three flights the following year. Where cecropia has two flights it is the same situation.
L

Thanks, Chuck. I either missed that marcellus thread, or had forgotten seeing it.

jh

This discussion bringns to mind E. marcellus. Here in the southern Appalachians it is triple brooded: A short tailed spring brood, a longer-tailed summer brood, and a scarce, very long tailed and darker late summer/fall brood. Are the late season specimens a genetic dead end, or do their ova ...

In The Beginning there was the glaucus box, and life was good.

And all peoples throughout the land were invited to place whatever they wanted into which ever of the boxes their feelings led them to.


Indeed, Chuck. Back in the late '80's or early '90's, I had a visit here by J. F. G. Clark ...

Problem is it’s just a bit over budget.


Chuck,

Hang in there. I'm intrinsically stingy, but recently when I debating buying something, my wife asked me pointedly "Which old age are you saving it for?" She's finally getting me to loosen up a bit. Wish it had happened a bit earlier!

jh ...

Problem is it’s just a bit over budget.


Chuck,

Hang in there. I'm intrinsically stingy, but recently when I debating buying something, my wife asked me pointedly "Which old age are you saving it for?" She's finally getting me to loosen up a bit. Wish it had happened a bit earlier!

jh

Over the past 25 years or so, mostly via the internet, I've been able to obtain nearly all of the old insect books that I used to have on almost continuous loan from my area libraries, in my younger days. Many of these, were published between the mid-1960s through the late 1970s. S



I had the ...

I'm sure there's some structural color involved, just looking at how the hue can shift with viewing angle. But there can also be underlying pigmentation, I think. That's not the case with the blue Morphos, in which the color is all structural.

jh

The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become that niclasi is manufactured by UV exposure of a normal green OV. UV light can destroy dyes and pigments, depending on their chemical structure. But for this to work in the OV niclasi case, the normal green color would have to be due to ...

Good question! And I'd love to know how these "blue" aberrations are manufactured. Exposure to UV everyone says, but what wavelength? How intense? For how long?

I tried exposing an old beat-up rag of a dataless O. p. poseidon to short-wavelength UV overnight (low pressure mercury vapor, peak at ...

Chuck,

Maybe nothing about us has changed since 2019?? And I guess they're going to trot out their time machine for the April meeting!

My guess is that whomever is in charge of the website just isn't doing anything, or maybe quit the job and no volunteer came forward to replace him or her. Anyway ...

Chuck,

Not sure what you mean about the SLS website. I just looked at it and the 1st page is an announcement for the April 25-7, 2025 annual joint SLS/ATL meeting, and a call for papers. (The fall '24 meeting was moved to '25 due to hurricane threat.) I haven't kept up well with SLS membetship, but ...

Chuck,

I guess I mean all of the above, if one (or more) of those activities gives one some satisfaction or pleasure. There's no accounting for taste, as the saying goes. Personally, I'm not interested in amassing a lot of bred exotics (or reared hybrids, which interest me even less). Always seemed ...

This was the intro from the book Hare with Amber Eyes. A book about a collector of Japanese netsukes.

I found it very applicable to all of us who have butterfly collections and no idea what to do with them, except keep collecting! It is a problem with no solution I can see.


Kirk, That was an ...