Crow

Identification - Euploea mulciber - Striped Blue Crow.

In fact a butterfly rather than an avian, but I am sure that you were not too confused.

This is a shot that I have been looking for nigh on two years. A fairly common butterfly, but the vivid blue top surface of the wings is only normally visible in flight. On the rare occasions that the butterfly opens its wings, a kind of refraction takes place and although you remember seeing the blue, on the image you only get a dirty brown with maybe a smidge of blue. It hasn’t helped that the butterfly is shy and very difficult to get close to.

This fine specimen landed about 12 feet away and was in continuous motion, opening and closing his wings. Even with 250th sec set on shutter priority, the required flash for the low light was not going to be enough to freeze the action. However, by timing the shot to coincide with the wing’s change of direction, the movement is minimized. Very pleased with this shot.

Computer update – disastrous morning, found a virus infection which makes text disappear. The virus was on one of my backup discs, as I pulled down all my files for some housekeeping. I ran a trial copy of malwarebites which cleaned the infection off and loaded a new version of Firefox. All seems well again now. I am going to buy the software, as my virus program failed to pick up the infection.

Dave