As a naturalist, I'm always looking for firsts, but I've already discovered the year's first butterfly—the Mourning Cloak I spotted and wrote about on the 31st of March—so the book is closed on the Lepidoptera debut. Of course, there are still premieres for individual lepidopteran species, and second place among all the butterfly arrivals is not, in any event, too shabby. Here's the silver medalist: a scallop-winged beauty—this is only obvious when the lepidopteran spreads its wings—known quite appropriately as the Eastern Comma. Polygonia comma gets its scientific and common name from the punctuation mark it carries, a silvery mark on the underside of both hind wings that resembles the sign in written English that it's time for a pause in the flow of the sentence. The comma had the same "pause" impact on the Naturalist, who stopped hiking and found the butterfly, whose dark underwings almost vanished from view as the insect perched on a collection of hardwood lichens. But there was that giveaway field mark drawing attention to itself and foiling the perfection of the camouflage... for me, anyway.