Western swallowtails

After a major bout of DH-visit-related cleaning, I took the camera to our neighborhood park. It used to be half undeveloped meadow, half lawn and playground and creek, but last year they did some major engineering with the creek and extensive "wild" plantings around it (mostly mallows and thistles). In the upper meadow, some unidentified blackish butterflies were interested in the queen anne's lace but unwilling to stay still long enough for identification, let alone photography. Near the creek were quite a few dragonflies -- a big green one, some big red ones, and lots of twelve-spotted skimmers, including at least one mating pair. Dragonflies of that size (3-4" or more) are fun because you can track them visually for quite a while against the sky. In the creek bed, I patiently photographed a western swallowtail, one of our most common summer butterflies, large and showy.

Walking back towards home, I then found eight or nine of them clustered in the shade of some conifer. One of these was unusually tolerant and let me take multiple photographs, and then, as if he was thinking, "oh, so that's what she wants," he flew around a bit and then landed on a bush, very photogenically: