Imagine. You’re in southernmost Ohio, a handful of miles from Kentucky, there with new friends to find orchids, wildflowers and for me, butterflies. You’ve entered a very promising refuge, Lynx Prairie Reserve in Adams County. Somehow you get separated from the rest, and you wander alone, into a sizable meadow.

Without your friends, you just hope that you’ll happen onto your #1 goal, new butterflies that you’ve never seen before. As you work the periphery of that beautiful meadow, you spot a tiny butterfly, flying low and relatively slowly. It’s not a white or a yellow, not an Azure or a Blue . . . What can it be?

Moving fast, you reach this tiny flier, and Ooh My Goodness. it’s a Metalmark? Not a Little Metalmark, too large, too far north and much darker in color than that. Battle Stations! A NEW BUTTERFLY for me, a Northern Metalmark butterfly. In the next hour I found more than 50 of them, a fresh, healthy flight of them, all recently eclosed from their chrysalises. ‘Locally Rare’ in only 4 states, flying just a month or so.

I was ecstatic, I’d struck Jackpot! This life of mine has seen much, and yet, that find, those Northern Metalmarks thrilled me, left me that word again, ecstatic! That finding a new butterfly, kind of on my own, can do that for me, Wow!

I shall always Think Of and Thank Barbara Ann Case A”H (OBM”) for she enabled that trip, and others.

Jeff