Marine Blue Plan Comes Together

Mystery Mariposa Comes Into Focus

Michael Sedano

Realms of green make up my oft-traveled routes when I consider how the morning light finds a bird or butterfly where I point my camera during my morning respite walkabouts at Huntington Library. 

Gulf Fritillary on Jessamine cluster

As a full-time caregiver, I know the vital importance of having time to myself. I buy two mornings with a visiting caregiver, and twice a week, Barbara attends a dementia daycare center, giving me six hours respite time all to myself to do with as I please. I pay a premium to walk the gardens of the Huntington Library two hours early, so that's what I please. 

Fritillary rests on Savila penca

A photographer gets the early light and not a lot of foot traffic to scare off the critters that draw my lens. The membership is worth the money and, membership has its privileges. You get the whole place to yourself, casí.

One morning I stalked the Aechmea flowers along the rainforest trail. My eye catches a white fleck against deep green. The tiny moth, or butterfly, flits erratically about, touches down but doesn’t land. 

I wait it out. The white speck flits in and out of the shadows, touching and flitting, disappearing into the leaves only to reappear a few plants away.

Then it lands. I approach and the white speck flutters away. I get a fuzzy foto that I identify as a Marine Blue butterfly. I'm intrigued. The name belies the look of this brown mottle winged soul. 

I add the Marine Blue to my inner alert list. I begin filtering the view sensitive to those flitting white specks on a horizon. Not the White Cabbage butterfly, nor an assortment of white moths and hover flies and tiny bees. Rarely catching a glimpse of the elusive Blue, I stay alert with high hopes.

Butterfly and bird photography takes what nature provides. When I see one, I see one, rarely three, in the distance. I see those white flecks and have no clue to the blue. 

"Ah ha!" moment: Marine Blue shows its color

Spring is in full flush in late March when I see my first blue Marine Blue butterfly on an unfamiliar plant. I get a foto at long distance. 

I see a few folded wings on this plant subsequently, but despite long waits there, not a one Blue parks and opens its wings to show off its hidden spectrum. The butterflies park and flit, I stand and fret.

Unsatisfaction is not dissatisfaction. You can do something about nagging unsatisfaction. Something has nagged at me since that inroductory sighting at the Aechmea, something about this tiny erratic mysteriously-named life. I need to get a close look, and I need to get a macro showing all the details and reason for giving this beast its name, Marine Blue butterfly.

My walkabouts at the Huntington Library and at the Los Angeles County Arboretum a few miles away  grow more intent on finding the Marine Blue . 

I capture many a Fritillary, a Monarch and a Swallowtail. Dozens of Colibrí bring my heart joyful moments of pure respite as I hold the floating creature in the viewfinder, slow my breathing, anchor the lens to my body, synchronize eye brain finger decisive moment and press the button. 

But none of the fotos feature the Marine Blue butterfly. 

I grow more deliberate in my walkabouts, choosing trails where antes I’d spotted the Blue, stopping on a trail on a sunny morning watching for flitting white specks, even shaking a plant now and again to see what flies out. No Blues. 

The Mother Lode. The Elephant Graveyard. The Diamond Mine of the 7 Dwarves! Uncle Scrooge’s Money Vault. Eureka. 

I find the place where Marine Blues come to feed on crisp Fall mornings when the garden offers little else. 

With changing seasons, Butterflies have become scarce, and with Winter around the corner I’d abandoned thoughts of capturing the elusive Blue in 2022. 

Weeks had passed without a sighting when songs of feeding Colibrís stop me in my tracks. The birds hide behind thick branches so I planned to walk on to the Sausage Tree flower where hummingbirds might await.

I whirl toward the path when a white fleck catches my eye. 

Only a Blue flies like that. Then a second and third appear like magic and so it is. They fly into a ray of mid-morning sunlight and catch the light. They target a non-descript bush growing like a barrier between the path and a spectacular red Esperanza tree where the hummingbirds lurk. 

Not a barrier plant at all! It is the Marine Blue motherlode, Dalea bicolor. I stand stunned at the sight of this endless parade of flitting white specks that circle about the plant then land. The insect dances upon a flower cluster, dips its proboscis into the well of nectar. Then they spread their wings to catch the light and lighten my heart.

I won’t label my quest after a Marine Blue an “obsession” although I admit to growing frustration last Summer when I couldn’t find the Blue in the garden, and that grew into a klnd of anxiety that when I did see a Marine Blue, I had the wrong lens or I couldn’t get near enough with the right lens. And I'd nearly abandoned hope for this year of seeing them again. 

That’ s all in the past now because I know where Dalea bicolor grows at the Huntington. And I've seen the Marine Blue at just the right light when their wings shimmer with diamond dust painting the hidden reaches of their namesake wings. Ay de mi.

The Marine Blue led me to the Dalea’s tiny flowers to teach me to appreciate "nondescript" dust-catching bushes growing in the shadow of spectacular ornamentals. 

Órale, that was no obsession but a well-defined goal pursued with a deliberate process of looking. Looking just at the world as I find it. Looking and not thinking about all those caregiver duties and responsibilities that you can’t see when you’re making a photograph of one particular six by four inch slice of the real world there at the end of your lens and that’s all there is for right now.

Sabes que? This close up is why.