Gram blue

In the morning, I decided to have a quick walk to shoot some

butterflies. Because of the dull weather, not many butterflies

came out to play. But these gram blues came out in full force!!

These fellas are really hard to nail because of their non-stop flight.

Yup, they are also extreeemely wary and flutter off at the

slightest of movements.

They seemed to like to flit close to the ground, then land

and bask with their wings half-opened. The male topside (below)

has a brownish base colour, and is strongly shot with blue, giving

it a pale purple appearance. The female is mostly brown,

but has the basal areas (the areas closer to the body) a bright blue.

These lovely butterflies are actually pretty common in

Singapore, and they love to fly around open grasslands, where

the caterpillar host-plant, pueraria phaseoloides, grows

abundantly.

The End.

Sightings from CCA

This morning I was out again with a few other ButterflyCircle

members explore some forest trails in the central catchment area.

What I wanted to go home with - the lesser harlequin. A small, rare

and beautifuuul butterfly. Yeah we didn't spot it. In fact we

hardly spotted anything. The first butterfly I saw was this little

Sixline-blue. He was actually feeding on the minerals deposited on

the leaf.

There were plenty of bush-browns fluttering among

the grasses too, chasing each other around. Much smaller are

the ypthima species. This fella is one of them, the Common four-rings.

This is a mating pair of Common five- rings.

The 'ring' butterflies are all extremely similar looking. Here

is an excellent article about our ypthima species and how the slight

differences tell them apart. The next thing spotted was the ever-

so-wary branded imperial. This male skipped across the trail and

showed me his topside.

After bashing through the trails but to no avail at all, we decided

to head back.This huge skipper suddenly landed heavily on a leaf

in front of me. Turned out it was a female Hoary Palmer. Sweet.

I made one wrong move and off it went, just as quickly as it

came. While searching for the palmer, I noticed a (much) smaller

something darting in and out of the undergrowth. When I peeked

under a leaf, a Plain banded awl was sitting patiently. 
It had such

wonderful glossy colours that were only visible with the flash-light.

Despite the low butterfly activities, it was still great to

get back out in the forests in a hit-and-miss quest to actually

see something new (to me, of course). And in the end I did see

a couple of new butterflies, making the trip pretty worthwhile.

The End. :)