On a trip to Trinidad, I had a chance encounter with a strange species of butterfly during a walk in a pasture. I tried to be fast and careful at the same time to photograph it without scaring it away, but I only managed to get three pics of it.
I had to wait patiently until it landed on a flower. These butterflies are commonly called "jumping butterflies" because they are very restless and flutter through the vegetation as if they are constantly jumping. Capturing them in a photo is an odyssey. The name of this butterfly is Lerodea eufala.
At first glance, the brown color of the scales of this species gives the impression that it is a moth, but it is a butterfly with curious white spots on its wings.
This butterfly was hungry. If you look closely at the photos, you can see in all of them a kind of black whip coming out of its mandible. This structure is a tube that it rolls over the flowers to suck the nectar to feed. This tube through which it feeds is called a proboscis.
The Lerodea eufala butterfly is usually found in North America, but they are also distributed in some South American countries, and in the Caribbean including Jamaica and Trinidad.
A characteristic of their scales is that they can turn a mahogany color when reflected light. This is why sometimes the same individual can be seen as dark brown and in other shots it is lighter brown with reddish tones.
If you read more about this butterfly, you can visit this link.
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