Banded Hairstreak butterfly

A couple of weeks ago, I started to notice the daily appearance of at least several small and quite dark butterflies in the flower garden. OK, truth be told, it was in the Hosta bed, which is what usually passes for a flower garden in our patch of dense shade. These pint-sized lepidopterans were not much bigger than a quarter, and they were often feisty, rocketing into the air and engaging in aerial dogfights worthy of Top Gun or Snoopy v. Red Baron. The battle over—no harm apparently done—the combatants would land and, obligingly for me, recharge their batteries while I moved quite close for pictures. That they belonged to the Hairstreak genus Satyrium was pretty obvious, and on close inspection I was able to ID the ones on our hostas all the way to species with the confidence borne of great experience—and help from ecologist David Wagner, who graciously corrected an earlier mis-identification. This one, I'm reasonably certain, is a Banded Hairstreak (Satyrium calanus), a very common species in our area.