John Kloetzel shared more from his Ecuadoran adventure, some of it spent at Sacha Lodge in Amazonia. “Glad to see you venture into the non-avian world, Harry — where you pay more attention to the natural world than most folk, obviously. Are you going to add butterflies and dragonflies into your world of commentary next? Some beauties in the Amazon: morphos, natch — hard to photograph those dorsal flashing blue wings. THIS guy did stay still:”
“And have you seen one of these bell-wasp nests?”
“And hard to forget one’s first view of a long line of busy leaf-cutter ants heading into their nest.”
The blue morphos butterflies are large, electric, making even our Mountain Bluebirds’ bluer look toned-down. Irridescent but pure, bright blue with no hint or tint of any other color. Besides the blue, jays, bluebirds and morphos all share the path to true blue. There is no natural pigment–it’s all structural engineering. the Blue Morpho does not gets its color from pigment, but from structure. Tiny scales on the butterflies’ wings have even tinier nano-scaled ridges that reflect and diffract light waves that hit the surface of the wing. All that is not absorbed is the brightest blue frequencies.
Towheeblog 
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