Native American legend of creation of the butterfly
Long and long ago, when the world was still new, the Creator watched children playing. He watched their sheer joy, and enjoyed their laughter. In the four directions he looked, he saw beauty—before him, behind, him, above him, and below him. He decided to create something to memorize this moment, something that would be a part of all this beauty. And so he gathered the blackness from the hair of the children’s parents. He took the orange and reds of the falling leaves. He grabbed bits of sunlight, and the colors of the flowers. He took the evergreen needles of the pines. He took the soft whiteness of the clouds, and added all these things into a bag of buckskin. When he finished, he held the bag close to his heart, and called the children to him. He handed them his bag and told them to see what was inside. When they opened the bag, a cloud of butterflies emerged.
Butterflies (Order: Lepidoptera) are brightly colored flying insects with two pairs of large wings that vary in color and pattern from species to species. Butterfly wings are covered with overlapping rows of tiny scales, a characteristic butterflies share with their fellow lepidopterans, the moths. A caterpillar’s first meal is its own eggshell. It then spends most of its time eating the leaves of the plant on which it hatched. An adult butterfly uncoils its long, straw-like proboscis to sip nectar from flowers, juice from rotting fruit and water from puddles. Butterflies are found worldwide except on the continent of Antarctica. Many species migrate to avoid adverse conditions. Most migrate relatively short distances, but monarchs and several other species migrate thousands of miles. The greatest threats to butterflies are habitat change and loss due to residential, commercial and agricultural development. Climate change is also threatening species of butterfly. Exact numbers are not known since there are about 17,500 species of butterflies spread throughout almost the entire world.
I was looking through my geocaching closet and after a methodical search found a foreign entity. It was a purple butterfly. Now solve the puzzle and go find that butterfly.