Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote -

"Happiness is like a butterfly. When pursued it is always beyond your grasp but, if you sit quietly, it may alight upon you." 🦋


Ref: Wikipedia

It's mid winter here in New Zealand and the weather is cold and dreary.
Here are just a few of the butterfly photos I took during summer, as a pick-me-up for the winter blues.
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I went out photographing butterflies this morning.  I'm sure most people will have an idealistic idea of what that might look like, with pretty flowers and nice gardens, however here is my reality.

1)  I find the scruffiest bit of ground I can, with specific low-growing weeds that the types of butterflies I am wanting to photograph will go for.

2)  I crawl along the ground on hands and knees, preferably at the side of the road where everyone can drive past and see me at my best.

3)  When I find a butterfly I dive - head down, bum up - steadying myself until I have taken the photograph.

4)  Eventually I arrive home, muddy, dirty and usually triumphant, but looking like I've been caught in a rugby scrum.
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In the past two weeks I've seen several roosting butterflies at night, which is interesting because prior to this I have never before seen any.  

This evening, just before dusk, I noticed a White Butterfly flying low around a small area of Clivia that we have growing at the side of our house. It's flying pattern was small and it was keeping quite close to the leaves. I watched it fly back and forth, back and forth and, after about 15 minutes of this, it settled under a Clivia leaf and just stayed there.  An hour later I looked back there and saw that another White Butterfly had joined it. Although not hanging upside down under a leaf, the second butterfly was quite settled on an adjoining leaf.

Given my enormous interest in butterflies, I'm surprised to realise that I've not really given much thought to where they might go at night.  

​I've asked about and found this information..............

ADDEDUM:
​This morning (the morning after) I checked at 7.30am, just as the sun was rising, and noticed that the butterfly under the leaf was still there whilst the other had gone.

The butterfly under the leaf was just beginning to feel the suns rays on it's wings. When I checked back 30 minutes later the suns rays were fully shining on its wings.

Knowing the cleverness of butterflies, coupled with my observation as to the length of time the butterfly took, flying around and around the patch of Clivia checking out leaves, there is no doubt in my mind that the clever thing deliberately chose the location because it provided (1) protection from above (by way of the wide, flat, Clivia leaf) and (2) was directly in the path of the rising sun's rays that would warm its wings and enable the butterfly to fly.

I think White Butterflies are beautiful. Don't you?
I must admit, however, that for most of my life until now, I (like many other people) saw them as a pest eating my cabbage and lettuce plants.  Since taking up photography in a serious way, and developing a huge love of butterflies, I have seen their splendour through different eyes.

From the first day I took a photo of a White Butterfly with my macro lens, my love affair with these much maligned butterflies began.  By laying their eggs on host plants for their caterpillars to feed on and grow into butterflies, they are only doing what nature has hard-wired them to do.    That we like to eat cabbages, lettuces and similar, is certainly not the butterfly's fault.

The small white (Pieris rapae) is a small- to medium-sized butterfly species of the whites-and-yellows family Pieridae. It is also known as the small cabbage white and in New Zealand, simply as white butterfly.  

The names "cabbage butterfly" and "cabbage white" can also refer to the large white.
The butterfly can be distinguished by the white color with small black dots on its wings. They are distinguished from the smaller size and lack of the black band at the tip of their forewings.

Ref:  Wikipedia

The White Butterfly is suspected tho have first arrived in New Zealand in the summer of 1929-30.   It was first recorded in Napier in March 1930.

It quickly spread throughout New Zealand by the autumn of 1936, however there seems to be 'jumps' in its dispersal over those few years.  For example the first specimen in the South Island was in the port town of Timaru, not in the Marlborough region as one would expect by natural dispersion.
The logical conclusion is that some specimens where transported around the country along with our shared food of the cabbage family. This is the way it is suspected that the White Butterfly made it to New Zealand (just like North America in the years before and Australia in the years after).   No one is sure whether the New Zealand stock came from Hawaii, North America, Europe, Asia or a combination, but most likely it travelled as a pupa in diapause as this would give it the best chance of surviving in a cold store.
It is recorded as having up to 5 generations a year in the north and 2 generations in the south. 

The White Butterfly is considered a pest in New Zealand, so several parasites (Ichneumon's, the wasps Pteromalus Puparum and Apanteles glomeratus) have being released to control it.
Unfortunately they are negatively effecting other species of butterfly, especially the Red and Yellow Admirals and the Monarchs.

The White Butterfly has characteristics not seen in other New Zealand Butterflies, namely the aforementioned diapause, a seasonal difference in size, and less black markings on the spring generation.

The Maori name "Pepe Ma" is translated from the English name.

Ref: NZ Butterfly Info