The Itsiest Bitsiest Butterfly

Okay, there is really nothing in this photo to give you much of a sense of scale, but this is the Western Pygmy-Blue (Brephidium exilis), also known as the smallest butterfly in North America, with a wingspan of about half an inch. They seem to be pretty common around here (“here” being the Phoenix area), but since they’re so small it would be easy to overlook them.

The Western Pygmy-Blue is really a great example of why it pays to take a second look at things that are small and inconspicuous. Yes, it’s tiny – but look at the beautiful detailed patterns on its wings. What a lovely creature!

Arizona Blues

Did you think that the onset of winter meant you were finally safe from my butterfly obsession? Well, you were wrong! Here in Arizona, where I’m visiting for the holiday, butterflies are still on the wing, and I checked two more species off my list yesterday at the Desert Botanical Garden. Both are fairly common, but since I have yet to do much butterflying out West, they’re new to me. As usual, it was amusing to be chasing after the tiny grayish butterflies most people didn’t even notice while other folks were admiring the big Queens and Cloudless Sulphurs. One woman stopped to ask what I on earth I was photographing!

Reakirt’s Blue – its host plant is mesquites, of which there are many at the botanical garden (and everywhere here, really).

Marine Blue – I like its stripy pattern. This one has a tear in its hindwing, making it almost look like it has an extra dot.

Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow!

Quiz Time!

In a couple weeks I have to give an interpretive talk as part of one of my graduate classes. For my topic I’ve selected cool adaptations of butterflies, and I’ve been working on making big butterflies out of cardboard and colored paper to use as props.

Now that you’ve admired my arts and crafts abilities (I sketched out the outlines of those babies freehand!), I have a two-part quiz for you.

1. What two species of butterfly are these?
2. Why might I have chosen these particular species for a talk on cool butterfly adaptations?

All of this information has been discussed in posts on this blog within the last six months. Answers will be revealed Monday!

 

Up Close and Personal with the Karner Blue

After visiting the International Crane Foundation, we drove an hour north to the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge, the only place in the United States where migratory Whooping Cranes breed in the wild. (Most of the migratory birds breed way up in Canada, and a small non-migratory population has been established in Florida as well.) I did get to see one pair with a chick, waaayyyyyyyyy far out on an island in the marsh, so they are now officially on my life list – hooray! But there was a second federally endangered species to be found in the refuge as well, one that we could get close to: the Karner Blue.

The Karner Blue butterfly, Lycaeides melissa samuelis, is actually the eastern subspecies of the Melissa Blue. This species can be distinguished from most other similar butterflies by the row of orange spots that extends all the way up the forewing – check out my photos of an azure butterfly from this spring for a comparison.

Karner Blues lay their eggs on wild lupine, and as their host plant has declined, so have they. However, the oak savanna at Necedah supports a relatively large population, and we were lucky that their second hatch of the season had occurred only a few days before our visit. Every few feet we’d see another tiny blue butterfly flit across the path! (Although they mostly perch with their wings closed, when they fly you can see the rich purple-blue of the top side.)

A life bird and a life butterfly, and both from the endangered species list – not a bad morning at all.

On Not Seeing O Kun de Kun Falls

Yesterday afternoon I decided I’d reward myself for the work I got done on Saturday by taking a hike somewhere in the area that I hadn’t explored yet. I settled on O Kun De Kun Falls, a waterfall about an hour north of here in the Upper Peninsula. (The odd name apparently comes from an Ojibwe chief.) The information I could find on it described a level 1.3-mile hike each way to see the falls, and although it was hot outside (mid-eighties, hot for here!) walking a couple miles on a shady, easy forest path seemed doable enough.

Unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be a shady forest path.

When I got to the trail head and started out, I found myself walking through an open, brushy, recently-logged stand of trees. It was sunny. It was hot. I got sweatier and sweatier without seeing any signs of entering a more intact forest. That’s not to say there wasn’t wildlife around – I got great looks at a Broad-winged Hawk and a Blackburnian Warbler and heard several other warbler species singing despite the afternoon heat, I found old wolf scat in the trail, and there was a lot of insect activity in the daisies, clover, and other flowers blooming along the trail.

Orange Sulphur

Aphrodite Fritillary

But when the trail entered what was basically a clear cut, I gave up and turned back. It was just too hot to be worth it when my walk was taking me through such disturbed, ugly-looking terrain. Maybe sometime when the weather is nicer I’ll go back and actually make it to the waterfall. Until then, O Kun De Kun Falls remains a mystery.

Batesian Mimicry and the Red-Spotted Admiral

I’ve written about this subject once before, shortly after moving here. However, I have better photos of a White Admiral now, and it’s a cool enough topic to be worth talking about twice!

Here are a couple photos I took yesterday of a White Admiral, Limenitis arthemis.

Here’s a photo I took in Ohio two years ago of a Red-spotted Purple… ALSO Limenitis arthemis.

Yep, these are two populations of the same species, which my field guide suggests could be collectively referred to as the Red-spotted Admiral, although no one actually uses that name. This is a fantastic example of Batesian mimicry, where a tasty species mimics an unpalatable one to get predators to leave it alone. In the southern parts of Limenitis arthemis‘s range, it overlaps with another butterfly, the poisonous Pipevine Swallowtail.

Photo by Jarek Tuszynksi, via Wikimedia Commons

So, it mimics the swallowtail’s iridescent blue wings. Further north, though, where there aren’t any Pipevine Swallowtails, what’s the point? So they revert to their white-striped wing pattern instead. Where the two populations meet, you can find butterflies with intermediate markings.

The “White-spotted Admiral” is in the same genus as that other, better-known mimic butterfly, the Viceroy (Limenitis archippus), which looks almost exactly like a Monarch – except in the western part of its range, where another nasty-tasting milkweed butterfly, the Queen, is more common. Out there the Viceroy looks like a Queen instead. However, the Viceroy is not a Batesian mimic, but a Müllerian mimic, meaning its warning colors aren’t a deception. The Viceroy is just as bad-tasting as the butterflies it imitates, and sharing their warning colors helps reinforce the message (kind of like how a wide variety of stinging insects share a pattern of black and yellow stripes).

To sum it all up: natural selection is really cool!

Butterflies on Chives

One thing I’ve noticed in the vegetable garden lately is that butterflies LOVE the big purple flowers of the chive plants. This afternoon I counted six species at once, plus a bunch of different bees and flies.

European Skipper (Thymelicus lineola)

Milbert’s Tortoiseshell (Aglais milberti)

Northern Crescent (Phyciodes cocyta)

Hobomok Skipper (Poanes hobomok – the dark “pocohantas” form of the female)

Down the Grass Skipper Rabbit Hole

(I hope you’re thinking, another post about little brown butterflies? YAY! I will NEVER get tired of little brown butterflies!)

I took this photo Monday afternoon.

When I got back from my walk, I did what I always do when I take a photo of a new butterfly species: I consulted my field guide and the excellent Wisconsin Butterflies website to identify it. If you’ve been reading my recent butterfly posts, I hope you recognize this as being some sort of skipper – fat body, little wings, kinked antennae. But it’s not a spread-wing skipper like the Dreamy Duskywing, and it’s not a skipperling like the Arctic Skipper, it’s something in the grass skipper subfamily. And grass skippers… well. Here is a screenshot of part (part!) of the grass skipper page on Wisconsin Butterflies.

It’s like being a new birder opening my field guide up to the sparrow page for the first time. Gah! There are so many! And they all look so similar! PANIC ATTACK!!!

…Um. So anyway. Based on the particular pattern of the dark markings on the wings, I’m tentatively calling this a Hobomok Skipper. Its larval host plant is grasses. I can’t really find a lot of interesting information about it, but eh, whatever, it’s pretty and I feel like I’ve achieved a new level of butterfly nerd-dom by diving down the grass skipper rabbit hole for the first time. Go me!

A Butterfly the Size of My Thumbnail

Cute, no? With its wings folded, as shown here, this little charmer was literally only a bit bigger than my thumbnail. If you read last week’s post about the Dreamy Duskywing, you may remember I described a particular group of butterflies, the skippers, as having small wings, stout bodies, and kinked antennae. This is another example of a skipper, in this case the Arctic Skipper, Carterocephalus palaemon. (Brits, you have it too – at least in Scotland – but you call it the Chequered Skipper.)

As you could guess from the American name, Arctic Skippers are mostly found in northern latitudes – in the U.S. you’ll have the best luck finding it in New England, here in the upper Great Lakes region, and in the Northwest. They spend the harsh winters of their range as caterpillars, rolling blades of grass together to make hibernacula (yet another great word!).

Another butterfly ID tip: no rule like this is 100%, but typically a butterfly species has a strong preference for whether it rests with its wings open (like last week’s duskywing) or wings closed (like this one). A good field guide will point this out. Even if the colors weren’t so different, the posture alone would have clued me into the fact that these are two different skipper species.

Attack of the Carnivorous Butterfly!

You know what’s awesome? When the butterfly you’ve been chasing around, trying and trying to get a decent picture of, suddenly decides to land on your hand and cuddle up for a photo shoot.

You know what’s even more awesome? When you get back from your walk and start flipping through your butterfly field guide to figure out just what it was that was sitting on your hand, only to discover that its illustration is captioned with the phrase “The only carnivorous butterfly in North America!” (Just like that, with the exclamation point! Even Kenn Kaufman is excited about this.)

It’s called the Harvester, Feniseca tarquinius. Don’t worry, even though you can see its proboscis it wasn’t trying to eat my hand. (It was probably lapping up salt from my skin.) It’s actually the caterpillar stage that’s carnivorous, munching on aphids, scale insects, etc., instead of on leaves like every single other North American caterpillar does. Despite having a wide range (almost the whole eastern U.S.), apparently Harvesters are pretty uncommon, and you can bet I spent the rest of the day yesterday bouncing around happily because I’d photographed a rare carnivorous butterfly.

In total on my walk yesterday I saw 10+ butterfly species, including my first Monarchs of the year. It was lovely.

Eastern Pine Elfin (another of my beloved little brown butterflies)

Meadow Fritillary

Happy butterfly hunting! Remember, for butterfly ID help you can always post photos to BugGuide. Or email them to me!