A Hummingbird Moth recently visited the Butterfly Bush:
They’re heavy-bodied moths and, unlike those butterflies, never alight on the flowers to dine. Their wings are clear and never stop moving:
It’s impossible to not see a face looking back at you, even though that’s a proboscis down the middle:
They don’t stay very long and are extremely flighty, so the picture are catch-as-catch-can: hand-held with the DSC-H5, roughly dot-for-dot crops, and only the last one got any color correction. I didn’t have time to set the usual one-stop underexposure, so the colors washed out a bit. I really like the first picture; almost all my mistakes canceled out.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Ed,
Nice to see that many of us engineering types are distracted by the same things, including your painted lady yesterday. I don’t know if you tried to touch your clearwing or not, but in central Ohio we see lots of these. You can easily cup your hand around their underside as they nectar in order to feel the prop wash.
That’s amazing, isn’t it? Even the bumblebees move those flowerheads as they maneuver, as though they’re supported by a column of air. Which, of course, they are, just like all flying critters.
Mary planted those bushes directly outside the living room window and her plan worked perfectly: we often dash over to see what just arrived. A few days ago, a hummingbird examined the red reflector on her bike as she rolled it into the garage, so perhaps one will pose for a few pictures out front, too.
Such wonderful distractions… [grin]
I like birds…
Bugs are kinda neat too!
This seems to be a Bug-Bird O.O
nice catch, Ed!
The first time I saw one, I flat-out did not believe it was a moth: the body is the size of my thumb!
Their wings seem grossly inadequate to the task, particularly considering what a butterfly carries around, but they still fly and think nothing of it. A wonder to behold…