The archduke butterfly, female.

Today, we present the lovely female archduke butterfly, yesterday was the male....very, very different.

I was in a valley looking for Birdwood's mucuna, when I found a lot of the lovely archdukes, both male and female. And this female just posed so beautifully. As it was dark and I was handholding a use an element of fill flash to pick up the details and keep the image reasonably sharp.

You can find the bristly caterpillars on the host Calophyllum trees.

You can see these as you walk in the tropical forests of Hong Kong, large, colourful, and very shy. And here is the male, in case you had forgotten how different they looked....