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Thanks for the results!! The butterfly you see now will in awhile find a nice hiding hole in a hollowed out tree knot, or broken off limb, or in an old derelict building or a woodpile, as I once found one, and hibernate for the winter. Should be have a long warm thaw in the winter sometime, it might even "wake up" enough to come out at the height of the warmth and fly around a bit. If it is really lucky it will find a broken maple branch and be able to use the sap for food. As the day begins to cool off again, it will find another protected place, perhaps even the same one, and go back to dormancy until real spring comes. They must have a marvelous anti freeze system. We have several butterflies here in NS which follow this pattern as well, the Angle wing butterflies, also known as Commas for their silvery punctuation mark on the underside hind wings, and their close cousins, the Question Mark, again suitably marked with a smidge of imagination. So they are often our first butterflies, but they have not just hatched out of their crysalids, as most other butterflies do, except the migrating ones, the most famous of which, of course, is the Monarch. It is a fascinating and complex world despite their small size, delicate constitutions, and supposedly simplistic ways. Other close relatives -it's all in the family! - Compton's and Milbert's Tortoiseshell butterflies also overwinter here as adults. And the commas and question marks have a distinctively different colour pattern (dark purply hind wings) for their summer brood as opposed to their overwintering colours which are much more reddish brown all over with only a bit of the dark purple on wing edges. How fascinating that they can change their attire for the seasons without going to The Bay! JET
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