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Painted Lady Butterfly

Vanessa cardui

Description:

These orange, black and white butterflies had an wingspan of about 6cm across and have black and white spots on the forewing and black spots on the hindwing.

Habitat:

Anza-Borrego State Park during the Superbloom. The desert saw an entire years worth of rain in just one day with many more days of rain. This led to an extremely green desert. The butterflies were on most flowers in the desert and even landed on us while hiking.

Notes:

On March 4th in San Diego, there were millions of migrating Painted Lady butterflies. It was such an amazing site that people pulled over in their cars to look. These butterflies were migrating north from Mexico on a calm, warm day. The following weeks had continued migration although not in the massive numbers seen on the initial day. We had an extremely wet winter which led to not only the massive numbers of these butterflies but also their food source. We had another Superbloom that turned our deserts green!

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Borrego Springs, California, United States

Spotted on Mar 13, 2019
Submitted on Jun 5, 2019

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