Red Admiral

3/8/2012
This guy was a pain in the butt to try and photograph. I must have taken 50 pictures. The following are the only acceptable ones. This butterfly would land, leave it's wings open for .5 seconds then slam it's wings together. So I got a ton of shots of it with it's wings shut but only one of a partial shot of a wing, for identification. It was super frusterating. It would also not let me get too close. It had a mate, I believe and they were flying around each other then would land then begin 'flirting' again.
Took me quite a bit of flipping through my field guide reference book, but I finally found the Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanessa_atalanta. Nothing too interesting in regards to it's life. It is fairly common in every state in the continuous US and stretches it's habitat into southern Canada, and apparently all across the other continents, dispersingly.