By Allen L Phillips
A Facebook friend posted some pictures of the California Dogface butterfly in response to last week’s article and I realized that I hadn’t done my homework. I have been putting too much faith in Butterflies of Southern California by Jim Brock which only shows a picture of a female dogface. Had I asked Mr. Google I would have found out that the male of the species looks quite different from the all yellow female, having a pattern on is fore wings that really looks like a dog face. I still can’t post pictures on Facebook but my Facebook friend did it so what am I doing wrong? Anyway, I have posted pictures where I could with this article of both the male and female as provided by Mr. Google.
So, since the male looks quite different and it seem highly unlikely that only females are visiting our yard, the yellow butterflies we are seeing are probably not the dogface. What we may be seeing is the Cloudless Sulphur which is all yellow with few and very subtle markings. The personality of these butterflies is definitely a type A and, while they are frequent visitors, they flit around frantically and rarely stop. This makes them difficult to identify and I would appreciate some input on this from readers.
Well, our lives are about to change dramatically. We made a deposit, in January 2020, on a “cottage” in a retirement community in Rancho Bernardo. This week they notified us that a unit was available. They offered us one before which we turned down because it wasn’t the model we wanted and the time wasn’t right. This is the model we want and we decided to accept it. We are tentatively scheduled to move in mid November.
My late wife and I bought this house new, moving in early 1969. I am handy and made many improvements myself. Pat has now been here for 19 years and with her experience in the flooring business we have poured more love into the house, remodeling both bathrooms and the kitchen as well as re-landscaping the exterior. We suffer from a mix of excitement and sheer terror when contemplating this move.
“Paying attention to being alive” is a line from a poem by Jack Gilbert and came to my attention when quoted in The Yellow House, a compelling memoir by Sarah M. Broom (For past articles in this series go to allenlphillips.wordpress.com and click on the heading “Life”.)
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