Return of Royalty

Today’s post features some images I captured yesterday in the church butterfly garden, here in the Ozarks of Missouri.

I’ve been waiting for the always fun fall migration of Monarch butterflies here and just the last couple of days has seen the initial arrival of these beautiful migrants. As I watered the church gardens a couple of days ago, I observed a single Monarch that remained in the butterfly garden for over an hour and a half. So yesterday I slowly inspected the underside of the milkweed leaves and found a single, Monarch egg.

Here are a few images I captured the past few days.

Monarch butterfly seeking nectar from a Tropical Milkweed plant:

Monarch butterfly seeking nectar from Tropical Milkweed

A single Monarch egg found on a Tropical Milkweed leaf:

Monarch butterfly egg on milkweed leaf

A cropped closeup view of the egg:

Monarch butterfly egg on milkweed leaf

I’ve got my “Monarch nursery” set up in a spare bedroom and plan on bringing this egg back so I can photograph the caterpillar hatching from it.

Photographic Equipment Used:

  • Canon 5D Mark 3 camera body
  • Canon 180mm, f/3.5 macro lens
  • Handheld (my tripod was not with me, so I took lots of images as I knew many would be blurry and unusable!)
  • ISO 800 (used a high ISO to help get a faster shutter speed)
  • Aperture f/8 and f/3.5
  • Shutter 1/500 sec., 1/4000 sec., and 1/3000 sec.
Posted in Butterfly Photography, Flower, Insect Photography, Macro Photography, Nature Photography, Wildflowers
Tags: .
Permalink bookmark.
Follow comments: RSS feed for this post.
Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.