Skipper

Upstream again early this morning. I found this butterfly in deep heavy cover and I really had no idea what I was photographing until I did the processing, as all I could see was a dark shadow.

Turns out that it was a skipper, that I have actually blipped before, feeding on a banana flower. This butterfly is more of a night time feeder and I don't see too many in the day, except for early morning. The night time conclusion is arrived at from the redness of the eye and it's relatively large size. Also when I have photographed it with flash from a distance, the eye reflects as a white dot and so is designed for very low light conditions.

As you can see, the flash has really brought out some wonderful colors from the wing scales, not normally visible, so you could argue that flash has not given a true representation of this glorious insect, but I like it. I have put three more, older skipper images in folio that you may like to see for comparison.

Looking at the other images, this skipper may well be a different species, as there is no feathering on the forward wing and could account for the color difference. What ever it is, definitely a stunner in my opinion.

Dave