Me: Watching butterflies float and flutter and swirl through the air is ridiculously beautiful and relaxing.
Also me: Sweet mother of God, he's trying to put what where?!?!?!
I had one of those need to get out of the house kind of days and considering it was gorgeous and sunny, albeit a tad chilly, and the next few days are supposed to be wild and wet, I'm glad I made the effort. I spent a lot of it slowly making my way through a handful of the MANY bush tracks in the Australian Botanic Garden trying to manifest an Echidna, or even better, an Echidna train but coming up with sweet FA.
That's okay because at the end of my adventure I instead ended up with some hardcore attempted Wanderer Butterfly sex in front of me and some hardcore heavy petting on a bench by two quite old people behind me. Firstly, no judgement. Secondly, maybe a little less heavy in future though, please and thank you. Also when I use the word 'old', I mean grey hair and a tad hunched over and not the way that two teenage girls used it when they screamed "Ewwww, old people kissing" when I happened to give my husband a quick pash down the beach when we were THIRTY!!! 😂😳😂
Still, what was going on behind me, was an awful lot more consensual than what was happening in front of me. One minute I was watching a Wanderer (AKA Monach) whirling through the air and the next minute she was grabbed, literally, and thrown to the ground. Yikes! You know those Butterflies that you see with shredded wings? You can see how that could happen when you watch this video. The male (he has the black scent gland spot on his wings) pins down the female and repeatedly tries to mate with her - you can see his abdomen reaching towards her, probing and searching and in a couple of quick snippets you can see that she is holding her abdomen well away from him. Some estimations have only 30% of mating attempts actually being successful and I can tell you, this one was a big fat failure.
After about seven minutes of being held down, flipped over and around, of stretching and pulling away, the female finally dragged herself up the stem of a plant where she was able to shake the male off and he flew away. I did film a lot of the intereaction but ended up only putting together about a minute and a half video because the only thing that made me feel like a bigger perve was all the times I kept checking over my shoulder to see how the day's other couple was getting on! 😂😉
Wanderer Butterflies
The Australian Botanic Garden, Mt Annan
