The skipper parade starts

May 30, 2015  •  Leave a Comment

Mystery skipperMystery skipper

On a beautifully sunny day—perfect weather, if not for the looming drought (several days of solid rain would be even more perfect—my neighbor asked me to stop by to see if I could diagnosis the source of a water leak. I stowed my toolbox in my garden cart and ferried everything down the quarter-mile driveway, then proceeded to come up with a cause and a solution. After this task—my semi-educated guess was that a new water heater was in order—I pushed the cart back towards home. But before I called it a day, I stopped by her meadow and risked the Lyme ticks to explore the grassland.  On one of the plants, a skipper, a member of a broad group of butterflies characterized by that thread on the end of the antennae instead of the more typical ball, put in an appearance. It was the first one of the spring and while it quickly "skipped" town, I did manage to capture an image. Skippers are very hard to identify from photos alone, and everyone I've consulted has told me to stop being squeamish and make a skipper collection to really learn the ID trade. Still, I think I might have figured out this one, which, according to the books, may be a Delaware Skipper, or, well, maybe not.


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