Piano Key Butterfly

Photo via ImageKind



A secret joy of mine is to play the piano late at night when no one is at home. I especially love to do so in the summer, with the windows open. I sweat and drip all over the keys and as soon as I hear a car pull into the driveway the private concert is over. I stumbled across the Piano Key Butterfly the other day and now I will think of them every time I'm pounding away on my old William Knabe.



Image via Florida Educational Technology Clearinghouse

The Piano Key butterfly is on of the Heliconiie butterflies, or longwings, and are found mostly in the neotropics of South and Central America. The Piano Key is more commonly called the Postman butterfly, know in taxonomy terms as Heliconius melpomene. Melpomene, daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, was originally the Greek Muse of Singing but later became the Muse of Tragedy.



Image via University of Cambridge Artwork for Media





Heliconius melpomene are widespread throughout their range, feeding primarily on the passionflower vine. Doesn't that sound exotic? "I'm the Muse of Tragedy. I live on passionflower."

Image via Heidi Claire

The Postman is long-lived and easily managed in captivity. It has become a favorite with butterfly conservatories such as Butterfly World, The Butterfly Zoo , and The Niagara Parks Butterfly Conservatory. As more people have seen the Postman butterfly and noted that some have the striking white and black markings along the hindwing, they have been increasingly referred to as the Piano Key Butterfly. There is a huge variety in the markings of our longwing friend, partly because they are so closely related to the Heliconius erato, sometimes even crossbreeding.

It can all be very confusing if you start to explore genus, species, sub-species..... but you will surely not confuse the Piano Key Butterfly with a Butterfly Grand Piano.

Image via Piano World

The Butterfly Grand Piano was manufactured by Wurlitzer in the 1930's and 1940's. It was generally less the four feet deep and was intended to attract piano players living in smaller apartments. The lid was hinged down the middle as opposed to the side, hence it's name. These were limited production pianos and very few remain available. I've seen then going for $500 to $35,000. The smaller student versions had only 44 keys while the "full-size" butterfly had 73 keys. A full keyboard is 88 keys. Wurlitzer did make an electric version for a short time.



Image via Well-Tempered Forum



Anyway, I've strayed as usual but that's our butterfly friend for today.



 Have a grand day!

Padpa .. what?

In this month's birthstone post about rubies, something was mentioned, only once, in passing, that I would like to re-visit. Of course I had to check this out when I first saw it mentioned while researching rubies since it was bling I had never heard of before. So let me introduce you to a very beautiful chunk of corundum by saying ...

Image via The Natural Sapphire Company



Oh look! Padparadscha!

Rubies, we learned, in any other color besides red are sapphires. Their red comes comes from little trace amounts of chromium. Chromium and ferric iron gives you the padparadscha sapphire. I'm not going to do a full post on the padparadscha, though it really is beautiful, but I'll borrow a picture from The Collector Fine Jewelry to show what is considered the most desired color of padparadscha- a mix of the Sri Lanka lotus and a sunset. Pink and orange- my two favorites! Perfect!

Image via The Collector

If you would like to learn more about the padparadscha, or pad sapphire, click over to The Collector for some good information. If you would like to shop for padparadscha, bring lots and lots of money.

Let's just do some quick window shopping while dreaming that we are reclining on a Sri Lankan beach at sunset while handsome young men adorn us with lotus flowers. But I probably stray from the topic at hand .....

Image via Palagems

Image via Gemrite

Image via Arican Gems

Image via Gem Select

Oh look, a pear! I like pears. Pears are good for you. 

Image via M.S. Rau Antiques

It's true that I fall in love with each month's birthstone, but seriously, this gem may really be my favorite. I know, it's one of the most expensive we've seen , but when it comes to my husband buying me gemstones, price is no object to me. Maybe to him, but not to me  ...

Image by Star Ruby

OK, that's all. I tried and tried to find a pad sapphire butterfly but Swarovski and glass in the padparadscha color were all I could find. I try very hard to make sure the photos I share are of the real stones, not crystals, glass, or even lab-created.



Image via Kranich's

It's just not the same.





So, alas, no padparadscha butterfly today. I'll just go back to dreaming about lounging on a Sri Lankan beach. Pink champagne is padparadscha colored, isn't it?

Wait, I can't leave you with that duck image in your head...



Image via Into Temptation





Ahhh, that's better. See you next time...

100 years of Silence- The Yellow-Crested Spangle

Well, this is The Butterfly Jungle, a place to celebrate beauty and surprises in life, so I thought it would be fun to periodically post a quick feature about one of our beautiful winged Lepidoptera wonders- common, rare, striking, beautiful, simple, huge, tiny. And what a better way to kick things off with a bit a joyful news, a butterfly that was sighted in 2009 after a 100 year absence. I give you the Yellow Crested Spangle (Papilio elephenor Doubleday)-



Image via ButterflyCorner.net



Kushal Choudhury, a lepodopterist researching swallowtail butterflies for his PhD, spotted a Yellow Crested Spangle in 2009 in the Ripu-Chirang Wildlife Sanctuary in the northeastern state of Assam, India (darker pink area on the map below). The sancutary is located in the extreme northwest of Assam.

Image via Wikimedia Commons


 The Yellow Crested Spangle, long thought by some to be extinct, is listed under Schedule I of the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972, which means "really really endangered and very protected."

Image via Wildlife Extra

Mr. Choudhury's photograph (above) of the mud puddling swallowtail is the first ever live photograph of the butterfly since it was initially described in 1845.

Photo by Naturhistorisches Museum Wien; Photographer Thomas Neubauer Via Butterfly Corner



So that's our beautiful Yellow Crested Spangle, making an appearance after a long, mysterious retreat. Don't you love it when there are new discoveries and re-discoveries in the world?

Thanks for visiting today- hope you enjoyed the butterfly!

Oh Look- Peonies!

We are finally getting some spring weather, though the early part of this week was more like full-on summer. But hey- I'm not complaining. The pool is full, the rain has stopped- along with the thunder, lightning, hail and 60 mile-a-hour winds- and the peonies are all decked out in their ruffles and petticoats.

There were plenty of flowers in our yard when we bought the house fifteen years ago but they were mostly all sprinkled about the yard, not in actual flower beds, so that my husband had to mow around each one. We set about right away corralling all the free-range plantings into beds.

One of these days I'll tell you the story about making these sidewalks.

All of the plants are a vibrant pink except for one, which is a beautiful white with pink and fuchsia highlights. It also has the nicest aroma.

We gave away about five humungo clumps of peonies and split the rest between the new beds. There is one last free-ranger at the end of the sidewalk by the road. It looks nice there but I'm not sure how many more times it can take being run over as we back down the sidewalk to unload groceries, gravel, lumber, or whatever the haul-of-the-day happens to be.

We'll probably re-do the beds around the back of the house next year as part of a yard overhaul. It's been fifteen years now and things are beginning to crowd and overgrow, we've planted a few trees and have shade now in places that we didn't have way back when so it's time to spruce up. But the peonies, with their girly ruffled skirts and sweet scent, will definitely be part of the new plan.

Some of these photos are kind of grainy- my apologies. They are from scanned photos.

So anyway, go out in your yard today see what's blooming. Have a good one!

 

Oh Look- A Strandbeest

I have decided that Engineers are really cool people. Dream it up, figure it out, and make it- even if it's outrageous. When you throw in a good helping of creativity and a wild imagination, iced with the sweet frosting of passion, well, you get Theo Jansen...




by JulianBleecker via Flickr



... and his Strandbeests.


Animaris Umerus - Part 2 from Alexander Schlichter on Vimeo.



Must. Watch. Video.

The skeletons of these animals, as Mr. Jansen considers them, are made of plastic pipe and tubing. They are wind-powered and are even able to store wind-energy in the plastic bottles you see along their spine. When the pressure, which is built up by the fins, or feathers, reaches that magical number, it is released from the bottles and pumped out into the "body" of the beast and generates movement. Well, that's my simplistic understanding of it anyway.

by JustinShull.net



via treehugger.com



You want one, don't you? We want one! Hop over to Instructables by clicking here where you can find directions to build a small motor-powered K'nex.


OK, that's it today- just wanted to share this with you.
Now my kid and I are off to gather the parts.

Have a great Saturday!