Red Admiral

I wasn't kidding when I said there were a lot of butterflies around here lately. There are many of them that either winter here or stop by on their migration to Mexico.
This Red Admiral one was nice enough to pose for the camera. Red Admirals live all over the USA (truthfully from Guatemala to Alaska and Iceland), but come south for winter around October and begin to leave around March.
The larvae are dark with thin yellowish horizontal stripes, and are kinda bumpy with vertical circles of spines.
The adults are 1.75 - 3 inches and are dark brown to black with a few white spots on the tips of their forewings. They also have the orange bars on the bottom of the hindwings and through the middle of the forewings, when the wings lay flat the orange looks like a partial circle.
They like nettles a lot as caterpillars and flowers and sap as adults.



I think this would be a good time to learn a new word: multivoltine.
Let's break off a piece I'm sure we all can understand, "multi" it has to do with something happening more than once. A butterfly that is multivoltinous has multiple life cycles in one season, more than one brood.
I find it interesting how these butterflies that were born in the north and have known nothing else still know where to go in the south when winter comes, and those that were both in the south know where to go in spring. It's an amazing thing.