Jon SullivanI went for a bike ride today, my monthly biodiversity monitoring loop from Christchurch-Prebbleton-Lincoln-Ladbrooks-Christchurch, and I found one patch of NZ blue butterflies. They were on flowering white clovers by the Halswell Junction motorway intersection, where I've seen them before.
NZ blues are essentially only found on the east coast of the South Island, having been displaced by the Australian grass blue from the rest of NZ. While their native broom host plants are rare in most places, their caterpillars can develop on clovers and lucernes, so we're lucky to still have these butterflies in parts of our cities and towns and farms.
Still, I only see them occasionally around the city. They seem like overgrown places with open rocky ground, and not our tidy, frequently mown city parks and gardens.
gerg
