Just Passing Through?

Back at the beginning of the summer we discovered that we had dozens of dragonflies around, particularly at the pond. Before too long I had dozens (then hundreds) of dragonfly photo's. When you add the damselfly photo's the numbers may now go into the thousands. Of course not all the photo's are of a good quality. And naturally there are quite a few that are virtually duplicates of others. I will often take multiple shots of one perched as I am approaching closer so the numbers add up fast. I realized that I had so many photo's that I might be tempted to flood the blog with dragonfly and damselfly posts and photo's at the expense of other things going on around the pond so I elected to limit my dragon and damsel posts to once a week on Monday.

Well the dragonfly and damselfly season is slowly coming to a close. There are still some around and I am still observing them and taking photo's of course. But, now that the season is closing, I figured I might as well retire the Monday Dragon/Damsel post. I will still be adding Dragon/Damsel posts in the future, but just not on a weekly schedule. Actually this will give me a chance to catch up on researching some of the behaviors I have observed and putting names with some of the species I have seen and captured.

Today I thought I would share with you a few of the butterflies we were able to capture last week at the neighbor's flower garden. We haven't seen many butterflies this summer. Well, I should say we haven't seen many congregations of butterflies. We see butterflies often, but normally they are individuals cruising about and they often don't stay in one general area long enough to track them down and get a photo.
On a couple of recent visits to the flower garden I have had a bit better luck though. There were quite a few butterflies around. The most numerous were the Gulf Fritillary. We had not seen any earlier in the summer, but all of a sudden several showed up. As a matter of fact, one day while I was there they all showed up within a matter of minutes as though they were traveling as a group.
I understand that the Gulf Fritillary is a migratory butterfly so we think the sudden arrival of several may mean they are just passing through. Whether they were residents or just passing through it was a great opportunity for a few colorful photo's.

I found it really hard to pick a favorite. I eventually decided just to make a collection with a couple of those above plus a couple of more. Of course it is best viewed enlarged.

And one more thing. I want to thank our neighbor for planting all those colorful flowers out where we can all enjoy them.