Painted Lady Butterfly.....

While growing up in southern Iowa, I thought myself pretty observant, but I never saw this particular kind of butterfly. In fact I had to look it up a couple years back to find out the name of it . It is identified as a painted lady. We see them a lot here at Woodward, north central Iowa, along with monarchs and moths. When people on our public tv talked about them they say they have been prevalent in Iowa since the prairie days.
An interesting note is that we do live in a monarch butterfly migration route and in the fall they will fly in by the hundreds and cling on the south parts of bushes and then are gone the next day. They eventually make it all the way to Mexico which is really hard to believe. Now that we have digital cameras, that will be my goal this fall to capture that scene.