Can't Get Enough of Those Gulf Frits

No matter how many we see or how often we see them, we can't get enough of the Gulf Frits.

That would be the Gulf Fritillary (Agraulis vanillae), a brightly colored orangish-reddish butterfly with silver-spangled underwings. It's also known as the passion butterfly because its host plant is the passionflower vine (Passiflora).

Depending on what you see first--the brilliant orange or the gleaming silver--the Gulf Frit appears to be two butterflies. Two dazzling butterflies.

Butterfly guru Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at te University of California, Davis, calls it a "dazzling bit of the New World Tropics...introduced into southern California in the 19th Century --we don't know how-- and (it) was first recorded in the Bay Area before 1908, though it seems to have become established there only in the 1950s."

We've observed the Gulf Frit almost year around in Yolo and Solano counties. Once we saw it laying an egg on Christmas Day in Vacaville (Solano County). What a gift!

As the year slips to a close, and spring beckons, we anxiously await the welcoming sight of a fluttering butterfly touching down on a gently swaying blossom. Like a Gulf Frit on a long-stemmed Mexican sunflower (Tithonia).

The butterfly is a flying flower,
The flower a tethered butterfly.
~Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun