nectaring flowers | Winged Beauty Butterflies

When you hike trails, fields, forest, wetlands, disturbed land and almost anywhere, you’ll see skippers. They embody a palette of browns, yellows, whites, oranges and other colors.

The Grass skippers are especially abundant. Our Peck’s skipper (Polites pecks) prefers sunny weather and as with most skippers, is nowhere to be found if the sun is not present. When seen, they perch on leaves for a while, fly to nectaring flowers and when they fly they are fast and difficult to follow, staying close to the ground and flying in unpredictable patterns.

The thing about Peck’s skippers is this: When you are working in the field during May through August, they are there also and predictable in an otherwise unpredictable world.

Jeffrey

Our 2nd post for Silver (White) Spotted Skipper butterflies. One of the largest of the skippers, it will more than likely be one of the few Skippers that we’ll post. Skippers as of 2012 remain very under appreciated generally, so we’ll respect the general mood here.

Skippers are very energetic, sprightly butterflies and those of us who seek to observe butterflies spend lots of time with skippers. As already noted, they also keep us company when we tend to our gardens and flowerbeds.

Skippers are usually the first butterflies to seek nectaring flowers. I’ve seen them busily working flowers before the clock strikes 7 A.M.. They remain active well after 7 P.M. That’s a 12 hour day! Whew!

Our example here is about to send its proboscis (tongue) into the wildflower. This flowerhead is properly identified as Epargyreus clarus is a butterfly that we have all seen. It’s a little less flashy than others, it’s time that more of us took note of this butterfly that we see so, so many times from April to October.

Jeffrey