"The butterfly, the cabbage white,(His honest idiocy of flight)Will never now, it is too late,Master the art of flying straight,Yet has — who knows so well as I? —A just sense of how not to fly:He lurches here and here by guessAnd God and hope and hopelessness.Even the aerobatic swiftHas not his flying-crooked gift."
"Flying Crooked," by Robert Graves, is often presented as being a mockery of ineptitude. The cabbage white does have an erratic zig-zagging flight, but I think modern opinion favors this pattern as enhancing evasion of avian predators. Photo by me.
Nice photo! How many seconds did you have to take that before that one took off?
ReplyDeleteI dare say that if our military planes and helicopters could so navigate, far fewer, if any, would ever get shot down.
ReplyDeleteGiven their impact on anything in the Brassica family, I used to see these "moths" mainly as pests in the vegetable garden. But, as the biosphere collapses and I see them ever more rarely (here in northern California), I'm more inclined to think of them as ambassadors, carrying a vestigial message of hope.
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