The temperature peaked at just under 60F for the second day in a row yesterday. I saw _Mesoleuca gratulata_ on blooming Hooker's Willow at Ft Clatsop and a likely azure flyby, but the surprise was a C

Here is another fun Colias graphic, some mid-September females. eriphyle from southern BC, philodice from southern Ontario and 'whatever' from southern Alberta: https://flic.kr/p/2ooKD28 -- Norbert Ko

Interesting. If eriphyle is the 'nearest neighbor' to eurytheme; then that would perhaps explain why in the older literature eriphyle has been referred to as a yellow eurytheme and why some eriphyle d

All, At present I treat philodice, eriphyle and vitabunda as distinct species. This is mostly based on two papers: Pollock, David D., Ward B. Watt, Vanessa K. Rashbrook and Erika V. Iyengar 1998 Molec

I neglected to mention a couple of additional identifications; In the previous century some people considered these critters to be subspecies of the palearctic butterfly Colias chrysotheme. And no dou

Here is a nice female eriphyle specimen from Mount Cole, British Columbia: https://flic.kr/p/2ooC7st The color is atypical. Here are some ways that different people would identify this butterfly: Coli

To go along with the female eriphyle from Mount Cole, British Columbia that I shared yesterday; here are some males: spring: https://flic.kr/p/2ooBvDN summer: https://flic.kr/p/2ooBvDc -- Norbert Kond

When Edwards described eriphyle he saw his specimens of eriphyle as "canary yellow" and his specimens of philodice as "sulphur yellow"-- Norbert Kondla Calgary, Alberta, Canada (elevation 1060 metres

Found pics of some female eriphyle, spring vs summer broods from Mount Cole in SW British Columbia; so made a couple of graphics: spring: https://flic.kr/p/2ooqQ1N summer: https://flic.kr/p/2ookwcq --

This morning I found on the internet a small but nice side by side comparison of male eriphyle vs philodice. eriphyle from Washington state, philodice from New York state https://www.floridamuseum.ufl

Recently I shared a graphic of some Pieris angelika paratype images borrowed from iNaturalist. Heiner Ziegler has been busy adding more images so I have made some more graphics of additional Pieris pa

Found pics of 4 more spring male eriphyle from southern British Columbia so made another little reference graphic: https://flic.kr/p/2oo6B8Q Compare with the spring male 'eriphyle' from prairie Albert

See: https://flic.kr/p/CMJuvH The right 3 are easy as eriphyle. The left 3 larger specimens score as 'weird' whether one prefers to hang the name eurytheme or eriphyle on them. -- Norbert Kondla Calga

Some are easy to distinguish. Here is one example: https://flic.kr/p/22CtniG -- Norbert Kondla Calgary, Alberta, Canada (elevation 1060 metres asl) https://www.flickr.com/photos/118126948@N03/

Folks with specimens of eastern spring philodice might find it entertaining to ogle these images of some spring specimens from the NW: https://flic.kr/p/TdKzgS The location names will be meaningless t

Further to this Colias 'philodice' topic; here is a link to a published map (from Butterflies of BC book 2001): https://flic.kr/p/2oo1js3 It uses the taxonomic hypothesis southern BC and southern AB p

Using existing graphics I made a simple 3-specimen comparison of archetypal males: https://flic.kr/p/2onQZSu If all the male butterflies of these taxa looked like this there would not be any identific

Maybe occidentalis and nelsoni are conspecific. Maybe they are not conspecific. It is an open question for me. Here is link to a distribution map that I have found interesting since it was published i

Thanks so much, Jason! I'm glad to hear it--makes it all worthwhile. Yeah, it's hard to curl up with a personal device in the back of the camper or tent on the cold, rainy tundra. I'll never forget cu

This morning I noticed that Heiner Ziegler had uploaded pics of some Pieris angelika paratypes to iNaturalist. These modern digital images are much better than the old printed-on-paper images in the o