23 October 2007

Orion

In the garden this morning
a large and beautiful butterfly
was flying around me.

Not knowing what it was I looked for it at Father Sanchez's excellent web site,
if you ever want to find or identify flora, fauna etc. here in the Caribbean, this is the place to go.
'The largest nymphalid in the West Indies:
the orion, Historis odius odius.
This is the butterfly with the most powerful flight
in the islands of the Caribbean,
rivaled in that sense only by its relative, Archaeoprepona demophoon.'

It was happily feeding on the Golden Apples that had fallen from the tree.
these apples are about 2-3" long,
which gives you an idea of how large this butterfly is.




In Greek and Roman mythology, Orion was the son of Neptune,

a handsome giant and a great hunter.

The sweet scent of fermenting Golden Apples was intoxicating,

the butterfly seemed a little tipsy,

Orion did bad things when he was drunk

but this beautiful creature simply wanted to

play.





4 comments:

  1. great pictures zooms of a stunning
    flutterbye.
    as i call them

    darrell

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hello Zooms! I was so excited to see you had visited me all the way over here on the other side of the globe, sometimes the whole cyberspace-internet-superhighway thing just blows me away. I love you blog and have bookmarked it. That giant butterfly is breathtaking! I will have the image of the enormous butterfly atop the golden apple, its gossamer wings drunkenly fluttering, imprinted on my mind all day. I love your cure for 'The cold' too!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good morning Zooms I have just done a post on the Orion butterfly. I have the whole life cycle recorded.

    ReplyDelete
  4. great, thanks island gal. am going to go see...

    ReplyDelete

thanks for visiting, it is lovely to see you here.

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