Newly Hatched Karner Blue Butterflies, Lycaeides melissa samuelis

We were exploring several preserves and conservation areas today in search the Karner Blue Butterfly, which is on the US Federal Endangered Species List. We started out at the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, where Karner Blue Butterfly Walks were given throughout the day with none of these butterflies observed. We then drove north to the area of Wilton, New York. There are about a dozen separate conservation areas or preserves within Wilon, New York, USA. There were predictions posted online of an expected hatch of the Karner Blues this week at the Old Gick Farm section. We explored part of that area without any Karner Blue sightings. I did observe a lot of other insect activity there and came back with 105 images of various kinds of insects from that section. We then drove over to the Camp Saratoga section where my friend, Barbara (mudder_bbc), came upon a small cloud of newly hatched Karner Blues along the trail and this image is of a few of them. We estimated there were 40+ butterflies in this location. Most were in one little area along the trail and some were flying nearby and landing on flowers and other vegetation. I took many images there and came back with 152 images from the Camp Saratoga section. I have many to choose from.

For this image, I used my manual focus Tamron Adaptall-2 Model 52A SP70-210mm f3.5-4 CF Tele Macro Lens with attached Tamron Adaptall-2 Pentax KA Mount on Pentax K20D Camera, hand held, manually focused, Shake Reduction set to 200mm, ISO 400, f22, 1/125 sec, with fill-in flash from camera's built-in electronic flash. This is a full resolution Large JPEG and is Straight Out Of Camera (SOOC) and is without any post-processing, adjusting, editing, cropping, or re-sizing.