Pipevine Swallowtail, PNP

If I had been an English major in the 1960s when I first tried college, I would have learned a skill called "close reading." Regular reading was good enough for me, but the more I immersed myself in natural history, the more I discovered the advantages of reading nature as closely as possible. Case in point: the first time I saw this butterfly sunning itself in a weed patch, I almost dismissed it as just another ratty looking Spicebush Swallowtail that was nearing the end of its flying days. There are a lot of past-their-prime specimens on the wing these days, and I thought that I might not even bother wading through scrub to take a picture. But there was something not-quite-Spicebush about it, so I made sure that at the very least, I would come home from my walk through the Preston Nature Preserve with an image of the insect. Glad I made the close-reading effort, because the butterfly turned out to be, when I finally analyzed the picture, a Pipevine Swallowtail, a much rarer species around here and a new one for my lepidopteran life-list.