Sign Of An Early Spring

Reminder:  You can enlarge any of the photos in this blog by clicking on it.  Click again for a full-screen image.

Those racetrack photos that I posted last night may have been too much of a departure from my standard format for some of you, I dunno.  Sometimes I find it to be fun to do something totally different.  Well, in any event, it’s back to the bugs and birdies.

The last week or ten days have been extremely warm here, even by southern Arizona standards.  We’ve had a steady procession of cloudless skies and temperatures flirting with or exceeding 80 degrees in the afternoons.  It’s wonderful for the tourists, and Tucson is overflowing with them at the moment, but its also causing the wildlife to act as if winter is over.  I don’t if that’s a good thing or not, but we are definitely making the transition from winter to spring.  At this rate I expect to see my first rattlesnake of the season any day now.

The other day I was a bit shocked to see and photograph a Gulf Fritillary butterfly.

Typically, I see these butterflies beginning in August and they generally disappear by late October.  This one was definitely out of season but it didn’t seem to care.  It was perfectly happy flitting around as if the next holiday was Labor Day and not Presidents’ Day.  Strange.

Photo taken with a Canon 5Diii, 180 f3.5L Macro Lens, assisted by Canon 600EX-RT Speedlite, ISO 125, M setting, f14 @ 1/160.