First Comma, LH

In the butterfly appearance serial that is currently unfolding, I finally got Lepidopteran Number Three to sit still long enough for a documentary portrait. This lovely beauty is an Eastern Comma, which gets its common name from a silvery or white comma-shaped mark on the back side of the hindwing. If you only have the front of the wings to examine, the field mark to look for is a horizontal bar at the top upper-third of the forewing. This is known, to taxonomists, as the "horizontal subapical mark" and it distinguishes two very similar looking species from one another. If the butterfly in question lacks that diagnostic mark, as this one does, it's a Comma, Polygonia comma; if it has the small black bar, then it's a Question Mark, Polygonia interrogationis—and no, I'm not making up these Latin names—which also has a silvery question-mark shape on the back of its hindwing. Regardless of which form of punctuation they represent, both species are among the overwinter-as-adults group, so they're the first on the wing come decent weather—and yet another reason, as if anyone needed one, to get outside.