Red Admiral Butterfly (Vanessa atalanta)
If you follow my butterfly photographs whether here or on my Photo A Day Blog, you have noticed that many of my butterflies are pictured on my driveway. The reason for that is that they are drinking water — tiny, miniscule droplets that are under the bluestone of the driveway after a rainfall. They dip their proboscis into the soil to extract the moisture. But until recently, I never knew what the mouth of a butterfly looked like. After photographing some well focused shots of this Red admiral, I finally saw that their mouth is more like a slit.
If you click on any of these photographs, you will open a new tab (or page) and go to the Flickr page, where you can view a larger version of the photo by clicking the "Actions" drop down menu.
You can see the proboscis here.
A closer view . . .
. . . and the closest view.
You can also see this in beautiful videos I found by jcmegabyte on YouTube. Below, you can view his Purple Hairstreak video that also shows the butterfly mouth. But explore his YouTube channel for other magnificent videos.
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