By Arlene McKanic
You’d think you can’t go wrong photographing butterflies, but actually, you can, according to photographer Holly Gordon, whose butterfly photos, “All A-Flutter,” are on exhibit at the Rockaway Artists Alliance’s gallery at Fort Tilden.
The lighting could be wrong, the host plant could be droopy, the butterfly could be too careworn, and of course, there’s always the problem of getting it to sit still for a moment.
Indeed, there’s a lovely series of photos of a common Morpho taken by Gordon with the help of her friend Kathleen Hervey in Costa Rica. The Morpho, a large butterfly whose males have iridescent blue wings, rarely stops flying and when it does it folds up its wings to reveal the dull brown and gray eyespots of the undersides. The gentleman photographed by Gordon not only stopped flying for a minute but perched with great blue wings outspread on Hervey’s finger, as if finally aware of its jaw-dropping beauty.
But Gordon, Hervey and colleague Laura M. Eppig didn’t have to run all the way to Central America for some of the lush shots of lepidopterans in the exhibit. Many were photographed at the Sweetbriar Farm on Long Island, including vibrant Monarch butterflies, a series of Queens shot by Eppig, emerging from transparent chrysalis; zebra butterflies, who have long, narrow black and white upper wings; a somber and beautiful pipevine swallowtail whose wings are blue-black and glossy as jet; giant swallowtails; great southern whites; a stunning pale green luna moth; and a nubuck colored Cynthia moth, to whom nature has denied mouth parts.
These large and beautiful moths are here to reproduce and die and that’s it. Even the caterpillars, those eating machines, have their own grotesque beauty, with their black and gold and green strips, polka dots, and golden fur. Even the bristly blue and scarlet protuberances on the back of a cecropia moth caterpillar are pretty, even if they don’t make you want to reach out and touch.
Gordon not only captures the beauty of butterflies and moths but their toughness as well. Her photo “Giant Swallowtail — Still Flying,” shows a butterfly with much of its hindwings bitten off by something, but still flying.
Another photo shows a mating fritillary whose wings have been worn ragged. Monarchs migrate for thousands of miles to their breeding grounds in Mexico, and their Mexican-born offspring somehow come back without having been shown the way.
Butterflies and moths are least 40 million years old, which is far older than us, and they developed, not surprisingly, alongside flowering plants. Their pretty wings weren’t made for our purposes. Their colors are to attract each other, natch, for camouflage and, in a very bold move by Mother Nature, to discourage predators. The Monarch is poisonous, and its orange and black coloring say to a hungry bird, “You want a piece of me? Bring it on.” The bird knows after the first bite to avoid orange and black butterflies from then on. So do other butterflies; both the Monarch’s cousin, aptly named the Queen, and the unrelated Viceroy mimic the Monarch’s toxic coloring.
A group of exhibit goers last weekend were taken by park rangers Nancy Corona and Kathy Krause to Fort Tilden’s community gardens and a pair of large and somewhat raggedy buddleia bushes therein to check out some living butterflies.
Most of the butterflies in evidence were cabbage whites, small white/cream butterflies whose caterpillars love to chomp cabbage leaves. There were also a couple of monarchs, a blue, some fritillaries and a buckeye.
At one buddleia bush Krause and Corona argued over whether the brownish, thumbnail-sized butterflies that lighted on the spikes of purple-pink flowers were Patchem or Zabulon skippers.
Speaking of mimicry, the bushes were also full of bumblebee moths, who look just like bumblebees and would like to make predators think that they sting — they of course don’t. They and the other butterflies went after the buddleia flowers with insanity. The buddleia’s other name is the butterfly bush and the nectar is irresistible. The butterflies fought each other in brief, tiny tornadoes in mid-air. Had the humans not been so large, they would have been shoved out of the way.
“All A-Flutter” will be at sTudio 6 Gallery at Fort Tilden through Sept. 22.
