Summer Azure, underwing
Celastrina neglecta
Summer Azure · Brooklyn Botanic Garden · 26 July 2026
A Summer Azure at rest on a flowerhead in the July border with the wings closed, which is how this butterfly nearly always sits. Azures are small blues of the eastern woods and their edges, and the summer generation breeds on the flower buds of dogwood and viburnum in a garden.
The underside is pale grey-white, and the faint chain of dark spots along the wing margin is the main field mark separating it from the very similar Spring Azure, which flies earlier in the year and rarely overlaps with it on the wing. The blue of the upperside shows only in flight. Barely two and a half centimetres across, and easy to lose the moment it lands.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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