The butterfly list.

uh whoops.

Spring has come and gone, and my ambitious posting plans stalled and were forgotten about. So let’s try this again, and we’ll just jump right into things; whatever whatever, nobody even has this link yet anyway.

A chance sighting of an American Lady a couple days ago reminded me that oh yeah right, I kind of meant this to be the year where I get more systematic about doing a butterfly inventory. I paid attention enough last fall to get a good idea of the dominant species for that season, but prior to that I have very few records on anything that’s not a big flashy brushfoot or a swallowtail, and since most of my remaining space is getting rationed out to host plants, I need that data. So I’ve been going outside the past couple days to try and take pictures of every butterfly that’ll hold still.

I’m working from the Butterflies and Moths checklist for my county, and here’s what I’ve got so far. Dark green is very common, light green is the ones I’ve only spotted once or twice. The rest are either somewhere in the middle, or I’m not confident I would’ve IDed them in previous years (hairstreaks, skippers). Asterisks are the ones I’ve found larvae for.

Skippers:

• Silver-spotted skipper
• Common checkered skipper
• Sachem
• Peck’s Skipper

Swallowtails:

• Zebra Swallowtail
• **Black Swallowtail
• Eastern Tiger Swallowtail
• **Spicebush Swallowtail

Whites and Sulphurs

• **Cabbage White
• Orange Sulphur (/Clouded Sulphur?)
• **Cloudless Sulphur
• **Sleepy Orange

Gossamer-wings

• Gray Hairstreak
• Eastern Tailed-Blue
• Summer Azure (/Spring Azure?)

Brushfoots

• **Monarch
• **Variegated Fritillary
• Meadow Fritillary
• Red-spotted Purple
• Hackberry Emperor
• **Silvery Checkerspot
• Pearl Crescent
• Common Buckeye
• Red Admiral
• American Lady

Bonus round: day-flying moths I wasn’t even gonna track

• **Snowberry Clearwing
• Grapeleaf skeletonizer moth
• Yellow-collared scape moth
• Faint-spotted angle
• Ailanthus webworm moth

This has necessitated going back through old photos to verify IDs, which meant actually sitting down and learning all the local skippers. The only skipper I could ID on sight before yesterday was Silver-spotted, so I’ve been going around glibly snapping photos for later reference like, “Oh gosh, look at all the different patterns, once I figure out skippers I’m gonna be able to check so many off my list.”

Nope. They are all friggin’ Sachems.

F

F

M

M

F

M

I’m used to swallowtails, where sexual dimorphism amounts to a little more yellow here, or a slightly different shade of blue there. But turns out female Sachems have a chevron shape (which looks veeery similar to Fiery and Indian Skippers), males have some pale smudgy markings or nothing much at all (unless you’re lucky enough to get a glimpse of the black spot on the upperside of their wings), and none of them are even a consistent base color.

I had photos of about 30-40 different skippers. So far I have found exactly two that I’m positive are not Sachem.

…I’m still really excited about that one, though. Look at this Peck’s skipper!

There’s a few darker skippers that I haven’t been able to get photos of, and today I discovered there’s definitely at least one other skipper I’ll be able to add to my list. But more on that tomorrow.