Painted Ladies

Painted Lady Butterfly
(actual size)

The beautiful, cool breezy Southern California skies are full of them. (And so, unfortunately, are the windshields and grilles of our cars.)

Boosted by the year's incredible rains, a bumper crop of Painted Ladies is moving across the landscape, flittering, fluttering, being buffetted by even gentle breezes, yet, incredibly, they travel about 100 miles a day! They are moving in a northwesterly direction from Southern California's deserts; the Santa Ana winds would fling them due west, but they battle against those strong gusts and move irrepressibly to the northwest.

Once they reach the coast, they will turn north, not stopping until the reach the lush rainforests of the Oregon coast. All along the way, they're laying eggs, so in about a month, we'll get another Painted Lady-burst.

I'm glad I'm not an evolutionist, attributing this wonderous fluttering to the mere chance of molecules and goo. How much better it is to thank God for this miracle of insane complexity in a simple life form. -- especially on a day like today, when the insane complexity of our legal system snuffed a simple life.