A new butterfly

Identification - Cyrestis maenalis, common mapwing.

It is always exciting when you spot a new butterfly to add to the collection. I kind of recognized this one as a butterfly that I had photographed before, but this was a lot lighter in color, the other being yellow/orange.

When I got closer, it looked more like a hairstreak, with the angled flaps at the rear end, looking like false eyes, but once I pulled up the other images back at the lab, it was indeed the same family but a different species.

I knew from previous experience that this was a difficult butterfly to approach, once disturbed it disappears into the higher branches of trees. The closest I could get was about five feet, shooting from behind a bush as he mud puddled. Feeding on nutrients in the mud is primarily a male thing.

With the distance and the awful light, I was not confident of getting a blip out of this, but good stuff for my records. But, through the 105 and the wonder of the plethora of pixels of the D7000, I was able to crop in and rescue a blip.

Researching, I was convinced that this was Cyrestis nivea, but a couple of sources state that nivea's range is 0-500m whereas I am at 1000m elevation. They are both almost identical butterflies and I could not tell them apart from the Wiki images.

Dave