Wow, when one of these is spotted where I live, there´s usually a crowd of bearded men with binoculars on the scene within minutes. You´d be lucky to get close enough to make a shot like this without treading on someone´s sandals and socks :) Good pic!
I've been wanting great butterfly shots for my desktop for ages.....thank you very much. Also, I think that the male butterflies do have brighter colouring than the females (similar to the birds where the male is usually more striking than the female.)
Nice chot :)
With some species of butterfly, you can tell the gender by the thickness of their antennae, but I'm not sure if that holds true for swallowtails...
If you ask me this looks like the Easter Tiger Swallowtail. In which case the female has more blue on the hindwings, so the one you captured here is likely a male.