After visiting Baskett Butte on Monday and refreshing my knowledge of the endangered butterflies there, I couldn't help but wonder about some butterflies I saw two days before at Dog Mountain.

Here are two pictures of a Fender's Blue, the first from Cornell University's site and the second from butterflyrecovery.org.







Here's the butterfly that I saw on Dog Mountain.




Here's a picture that "Spoonie" took the same day (also at Dog Mountain) of a similar butterfly.




Typically, the biologists know a lot more than me, so I'm guessing this is a very similar looking different species. That begs the question of what the Dog Mountain butterflies are and how do we distinguish them from Fender's?

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What do you suppose is around that next bend?

I've seen blue butterflies that were similar, but without the black and white border on the wings, in the hundreds on the trails near Image Lake in the Glacier Peak Wilderness in WA. They were the same beautiful blue as shown in the photos above--the only difference was the lack of border.

OK. in Steve's post we have the Dog Mountain blue butterfly and the Baskett Butte blue butterfly and the Fender's blue butterfly and the three look exactly the same to this non-entomologist.... :-) Whatever the species, they are certainly beautiful!

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May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.--E.Abbey