Purplish
Purplish means somewhat purple; as when an artist mixes a dab of this royal color into another pigment to get an intermediate hue. Our Purplish Coppers are not 'purplish' in this sense. Indeed, many would say that they are not purplish in any sense. Scanning published images of the butterfly, you'd admit that they have a point. Generally speaking, Tharsalea helloides seem to be either orange(female) or grey-brown(males) and not purple at all.
Purple color can be found only in young males, and then only for a day or so. Not a mixture, but a pure hue produced by interference as sunlight refracts through the many regular transparent layers of their scales. Like all iridescence, the intensity varies with the angle of viewing; so your handsome, if earth- toned insect might flash brightest lilac as it shifts its wings. Some of the freshest males might properly be called purple coppers. More commonly, as scales thin out day by day, the effect is less, with a shimmer of purple floating over the ground color: purplish!
Of the 2500 or so images of T. helloidies on Inat, only about 1% show any tincture of purple. I've had better success in Sonoma County, so at times I've wondered if we had a more vividly colored race of coppers. I'm convinced we don't, but instead simply have a lot more of these small lycanaeids. I've a definite bias to concentrating on the prettiest butterflies, and I'm drawing from a deeper pool.
For unknown reasons, Purplish Coppers have been in decline around the Bay. When Tilden published his excellent small book on San Francisco butterflies in 1965 they were "everywhere"; now, not so much. But unlike other species declining because of habitat loss, this is a creature rather favored by modern civilization,
hosted by the ubiquitous Docks and Knotweeds that thrive on the bits swampy 'waste ground' generally safe
from development. Bit of a mystery what's gone wrong.
At least where I live this seems to have eased. We are seeing more butterflies in more places, and seeing flights starting in spring and persisting until frost. I hope this is happening in the rest of our region as well.
If so, we'll see both more posting, but especially more of the choice purple individuals sifted out by discriminating correspondents. Because there seems to be no clear factor driving their decline, there seems lots of room for hope.
