The Endangered and Beautiful, Unique Bartram's Hairstreak Butterfly Puzzle Piece

Bartram's Scrub-Hairstreak Butterfly

The Bartram's Scrub-Hairstreak Butterfly is a beautiful, softly colored butterfly with pops of orange contrasted against the muted grays and tans.  It is native to South Florida, where I live, but have never seen one in my outdoor adventures, but that may be because they are a federally endangered species.  We always see paintings of flamboyantly decked out butterflies, so I wanted to highlight one that is more understated at first glance, but once you start to look at it the pops of rusty orange and the stripes on it's antennae and legs makes one realize just how beautiful of a butterfly species the Bartram is.  In this piece of A NeverEnding Story puzzle, the beautiful, and unique butterfly is perched on a curling vine admiring the pink tinted clouds floating past.

The Bartram's Hairstreak is a tiny little creature, measuring no more than an inch, and resides in the Pine Rockland habitat of South Florida on it's host plant, the pineland croton.  They usually don't stray more than 17 feet from their host plant, but will make use of other vegetation nearby.

These butterflies don't migrate which is one of the reasons they are susceptible to loss of habitat and endangered, they only exist in a couple of small areas.

Not a lot is known about these butterflies, including their lifespan, but it is known that they molt 5 times while they are growing, and that they are fast and hard to detect as they blend in with the foliage around them.  

​This puzzle is A Neverending Story...I am going to continue to add new puzzle pieces for an undetermined amount of time, but hopefully for a very long time!  Each piece of this puzzle will feature an animal, some of them endangered, some recovered from the endangered list through conservation efforts and others just because, haha! 

My goal for this work of puzzle art is to create a beautiful, colorful celebration of animals and the natural world.  We are all interconnected, and share this amazing planet that we get to call home.  By creating this puzzle and sharing it with art collectors and animal lovers around the world, I hope to create a sense of togetherness, we ARE in this together, and we need to be aware of our impact on the environment and other species, and be sure to make it positive.  Let's join together and help preserve and nurture this beautiful world that we all share, and celebrate the wonder of all the beautiful creatures that work in symbiotic harmony to create the most beautiful puzzle...planet earth.

A portion of the proceeds from each puzzle piece will be donated to ReWild, an organization I have collaborated with, and contribute to, to help “conserve the diversity of life on Earth".

Updated progress on the original A NeverEnding Story Puzzle Painting