Nice picture of a Battus philinor larva. Much lighter colored than the ones I've collected in SE AZ.

FWIW: At the place I have collected them several times in SE AZ, the plants are also very hard to locate down in and under all the other weeds of the area, making it also very difficult to find the larva. This was partially due to the larva almost completely defoiliating them. I found it fairly common to find several earlier instar larva feeding on the same small plant at first and before they disperse on their own - probably because they had about devoured the current plant. But I learned a trick for finding the plant by finding the larva during two narrow windows of time daily. Easiest with 4th, 5th and 6th instar larva because of their greater size. At least at this location in AZ, during the last 1/2 to 3/4 hour of daylight the larva tend to move off the pipevine and to a higher elevation on whatever other plant happens to be close by (so they are 3'-6' above ground), spend the night there and then descend back to the pipevine the next morning right after dawn. Down in the weeds very close to where they are spending the night will be the pipevine they were feeding on. Anyway, I found that I could drive the roads in the evenings and just watch for larva up on other plants. Got to where I could see them even at 30-35 MPH.

I love PVS especially since they are quite a rare find here in CT.

This is the first PVS cat I spotted in the wild during one of my early July PVS "safaris."

The two I found later in the summer were much redder, I'll post a picture of those soon.

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