Few, in their daily pursuit of fleeting gains and lazy dashes from one chilly box to another, bother to peer up at the bowers of rain trees, yellow flames and angsanas that still flank some of the island's wider boulevards and house in their outstretched limbs a bestiary of uncivilised proportions. Few pay heed to the flashes of azure, orange dragons and streaks of furry brown that call from the canopy above the city's broad avenues and slippery roads. Fewer still notice the restless songbirds, shrieking cuckoos, gliding lizards and tiny blue butterflies that chart their own routes through town, darting from tree to tree or floating from one grassy patch to another, staying a perilous step ahead of cutters and sprayers as well as planners who prefer cool, clean concrete to the chaos of warm things.
One fragile beauty that has survived the clearing of lowland forests to bob in the arboureal highways of a guarded city is the painted jezebel. One of the few members of its genus in the peninsula to persist in the searing woods of Malayan coasts, Delias hyparete metarete is a wanderer of tropical plains with the strength to withstand the heat of metropolitan regions. Adults are usually betrayed by a glimmer of bright yellow and touch of red as they sail over pavements and car parks with lazy strokes and wheel around the lower boughs of wayside trees in search of Malayan mistletoes. In their flight, there is little of the swallowtail's nervous speed, for the brilliance of these butterflies is a call to caution and the pierines in their brazen finery coast unmolested by avian hunters.
In the Minahasa highlands of Northern Sulawesi, which loom over the city of Manado and straddle a sprinkling of volcanoes that stew in their steam, the cool plateau of Tomohon offers a retreat from the scorching sea and a montage refuge for three species of Delias, two of which abound in the gardens of an inn built in the lap of two smoking peaks and between elevated ricefields. Both species have blindingly pale uppersides with dusty forewing tips, but differ in the extent and distribution of yellow and red on the underside of the hindwings.
On the wing til mid-morning and late in the day, the butterflies fluttered around ixora bushes and flowering trees, hovering briefly before the blooms but never fully alighting, sipping without stopping, defying attempts to pin them down and play up their primary colours. The insects vanished around mid-day, but a few lingered in a nearby copse, settling on low foliage and stirring little after their feeding frenzy. This habit is shared by local jezebels, which land in the shade when the sun hits its stride and offer no apologies for the bold trappings and urban tenacity of lepidopteran lovers in the final, fleeting stage of their lives.
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