8 May 2025: (First posted on my Facebook Profile on 21 July 2023.)

Recently, after drinking a bottle of Blue Moon Brewery’s wheat beer and eating frozen blueberries, I thought about blue butterflies, not blue moons or blue-colored berries. Why? I had earlier watched (via DVD) the 2004 Canadian-made film The Blue Butterfly, about a terminally ill, butterfly-loving Canadian boy who, to fulfill his dying wish and accompanied by his mother and a male butterfly expert, travels to a Central American rainforest hoping to catch a large “magical” blue butterfly, the blue morpho (Morpho peleides). 

  Years ago, I saw, but did not try to capture, a blue butterfly in a rainforest: In the early 1990s, while traveling with a guide in a rainforest in Australia’s northern Queensland, I sighted, at about noontime, a blue Ulysses butterfly (Papilio ulysses), which is a large swallowtail butterfly. In a magazine travel article, I briefly wrote: “During a rest stop beside a creek, I fed bread crumbs to creek fish and wrote postcards to friends in Hawai‘i stamped with an Australian postage stamp decorated with a portrait of the blue Ulysses butterfly. Then I saw it. A flash of iridescent blue, also called ‘electric blue’, zigzagging in midair, a solitary Ulysses fluttering among the green foliage that concealed snakes and flightless birds. The butterfly’s colorful wings mesmerized me: they flickered like a brilliant blue star in the green, sunlit rainforest.” (Happily, it was not a rainy day in the rainforest.)

  Illustration: A kaleidoscope (aka swarm, flutter) of public-domain graphics of blue butterflies, mostly fantasy, selected and displayed by me on a public-domain painting, titled Area Broken by Perpendiculars, by the Russian-born artist Joseph Schillinger (1895–1943). Also inserted by me is a tablet-computer-framed, public-domain painting of Australia’s Ulysses blue butterfly and plant leaves. Ulysses blue butterfly trivia: Males are known to be highly attracted to the color blue, and in the wild it is possible to entice males down from the tree canopy with a shiny piece of blue paper or metal. Image credits: Raw Pixel, Pixabay, and PublicDomainVectors.