Silver-spotted Skipper

I'd figured on zeroing in on moths for the upcoming National Moth Week festivities, but on today's foray into the Bell Cedar Swamp preserve, I discovered this magnificent little butterfly called a Silver-spotted Skipper nectaring on some white flowers I still have to identify and I had a change of heart. Skippers are butterflies, or, better put, moths that work the day shift, and you can tell the skippers from other lepidopterans by the antennae: butterflies have antennal knobs while skippers have a thin extension of the antennal club. But beyond the ease in telling what group they belong to, skippers are notoriously hard to ID. For many species, you really have to collect them, kill them, and put them under the microscope, and even then, well, lepidopteran expert Jeffrey Glassberg calls them the "agony and ecstasy of butterflying" in Butterflies through Binoculars, the classic field guide.  Epargyreus clarus is the ecstasy side of the equation: easy to know, since it's large and the wings are so bold that you can't confuse it with any other skipper, let alone butterfly. I've been looking for it for about a week now, and this afternoon, double ecstasy!