Common Mestra

About the Common Mestra

The Common Mestra is a soft, delicate butterfly of the South Texas brush - pale ash-gray with a translucent look, orange-tan patches on the hindwings, and a lazy, floating flight low over the vegetation. It is one of the most distinctive butterflies in the Valley precisely because it looks like nothing else there.

Mestras drift along woodland edges and through gardens, settling to nectar on small flowers with wings held open. The caterpillars feed on noseburn, a low stinging-hair plant of dry scrub, which keeps the butterfly tied to the brush country.

In Texas the Common Mestra flies year-round in the Rio Grande Valley and up the coast, and in good years it strays far north into Central Texas in late summer and fall - a soft gray surprise in an Austin garden.