Insects & others · plate 59 of 60
Butterfly
Danaus plexippus
Three thousand miles on nectar and a hunch.
5.3% of people are Butterflies. (estimated)
If you're a Butterfly
You are light, restless and much tougher than you look. You will go a very long way on very little, you navigate by instinct and sunlight, and you are not especially bound to anyone or anywhere. People think you are decorative. You are a long-distance traveler who happens to be pretty, and the colors are a warning, not an invitation.
A monarch butterfly that hatches in late summer flies up to about 4,800 kilometers to the same forests in central Mexico its ancestors used, though it has never been there.
The Butterfly as a spirit animal
You travel light and far, you don't hold on, and you have a sense of direction that has nothing to do with maps. You are more resilient than anyone expects of something so delicate, and the bright colors are a genuine warning: you are not to be eaten. The flaw is that nothing and nobody gets to keep you; you lay one egg per leaf and keep going. A monarch never sees the place its grandchildren will arrive.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Butterfly
Do
- Plan around the season; they are present, then absent, then present as someone slightly different.
- Offer something sweet and a sunny place to land.
- Let them go without a scene; the trip is the point.
Don't
- Don't try to hold them; the scales come off on your fingers and they don't grow back.
- Don't mistake the colors for decoration. They're a warning label.
When it goes wrong: A butterfly under threat flashes the warning colors and leaves on the wind; don't grab, step back, and it settles somewhere else within a minute.
The Butterfly in a relationship
You love in passing, warmly and without plans. You are a delight for the length of a summer and then you are over the horizon with the season. You are not cold; you are migratory. Anyone who wants to keep you will need to be heading the same way, at the same speed.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 5
- Boldness
- 2
- Energy
- 5
- Curiosity
- 5
- Devotion
- 0
- Roaming
- 10
- Monarchs taste with their feet, which is how a female checks that a leaf is milkweed before laying an egg on it.
- The caterpillar eats only milkweed and stores its toxins, which makes the adult poisonous to most birds.
- The migrating generation lives up to eight months; its summer parents lived a few weeks.
Butterflies in literature
- The Butterfly — The Butterfly that Stamped (Just So Stories), Rudyard Kipling (1902)
- The Butterfly — The Butterfly, Hans Christian Andersen (1861)
- The white butterfly — Kwaidan (Butterflies), Lafcadio Hearn (1904)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Butterfly's. If you got Butterfly, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other insects & others
Among the 60
Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, Brockhaus-Efron (1891). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
