Winging It

day 4: a butterfly appreciation post

Your AI-free reminder that you can find or create joy while also feeling fear, rage, despair, and other prickly crap.

Welcome to our annual solstice-ish ADVENTure calendar of daily joys and treats.

Can we take a moment for a butterfly appreciation post?

Today’s advent calendar treat is a reminder that sure, we live in a time of such unfathomable weirdness as 6-7, skibidi toilet, and ICE but there’s also butterflies.

This is the A number one main reason why I think butterflies are so cool:

They can see BILLIONS more colors than we can. We humans have two lenses (eyes) and three types of photoreceptors, which perceive red, green, and blue. Butterflies, on the other hand, have thousands of lenses (eyes) and as many as 15 different kinds of photoreceptors. There are whole spectrums of color and light, like UV, they can see but we cannot.

Think about your color blind friend and how sad you are for them because they see the world in shades of greige. We can’t understand that they can’t understand that color is so much richer than what they can percieve and experience. Butterflies are like, same, girl, same. Y’all only got three colors receptors and no UV? You sad color deprived creature. No wonder you hate nature and are destroying the planet. I’d be pissed too.

It’s not all sparkly rainbows for butterflies, though. They don’t have any depth of field among all of that color, so what they see is more a mosaic of bajallions of colors, a kal-EYE-descope.

Let me just plant this idea here: imagine the spectrum of eye shadow drama on a butterfly drag queen.

Okay, more cool shit about butterflies:

Collective noun: flutter

Let’s talk about metamorphosis: a caterpillar gets all fuck all y’all, hides away from the world, wraps itself up in a little blanket, hangs out for a week or so while it turns into absolute gooey mess—like a puddle of sticky goop— then somehow gets it shit together and emerges as a transcendent queen, no longer crawling its way on the surface the world, but flying through the air.

Butterfly wings are transparent: the color and pattern you see is not from pigment, but light refracted off of thousands of tiny scales that make up the wings

Puddling: butterflies exist on a liquid diet, mostly nectar from flowers. To supplement any minerals they may need, they’ll drink from mud puddles.

Wing wing: butterflies have four wings, two on either side.

Foot in mouth: I have no idea how scientists figured this out, but butterflies taste buds are in their feet.

see you tomorrow

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You can find my art here and here. I offer custom workshops and design. I am the proud guardian/custodian of a 17 year old cheeseburger named Patty.

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words and images © Rubi McGrory 2021-2025