Flight of the cabbage white butterfly
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This cabbage white butterfly takes flight in the fall. UC Davis distinguished professor Art Shapiro spotted his first of the year on Jan. 16 on the UC Davis campus.
Kathy Keatley Garvey/Courtesy photo
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Shapiro spotted a cabbage white butterfly,
Pieris rapae, at 1:55 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 16, on the UCD campus, just south of the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, at 254 Old Davis Road.
“At 1:55 p.m., I saw a male rapae flying a linear path along the edge of the waste ground between campus parking lot 1 and the railroad track, heading east,” he wrote in an email. “It stopped to nectar at a large Raphanus (wild radish) plant. That was directly south of the Manetti-Shrem Art Museum. I did not have a net and, there being no contest requiring a voucher, I did not care. It was 72F and clear with a trace of NE wind. I kept going. This is the earliest rapae since i.16.16 (Jan. 16, 2016).