Fall Skipper Boot Camp

Thanks everyone for the great questions and ideas last night during our slide introduction to the area’s confusing fall skippers! I look forward to seeing many of you in the field in the morning (more below).

Here are the slides from last night for your review or future use.

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For our field trip tomorrow, we will meet at 10 am at the National Arboretum in Washington, DC. The National Arboretum is located in the northeast section of Washington, DC, approximately ten minutes from the Capitol Building. There are two entrances: one at 3501 New York Avenue, NE, and the other at 24th & R Streets, NE, off of Bladensburg Road. The R Street entrance is CLOSED to incoming automobile visitor traffic after 2:00 p.m. Monday through Thursday and all day Fridays and weekends. Bicycles and pedestrians through R Street at all times. All vehicles, including deliveries, contractors, tours, and volunteers, must use the New York Avenue entrance between 2:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. Monday through Thursday and all day Fridays and weekends. Traffic will be able to exit through the R Street gate during these closure hours.

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We will meet at 10 am on the large patio by the visitor center (next to the Bonsai Gardens and opposite the entrance to the herb and rose gardens). We’ll spend the first half of our field trip in this area, moving between the various gardens and meadow areas around the visitor center and garden shop. There are restrooms and vending machines in the garden shop building.

Our next stop will be the Youth Garden and restored meadows near Fern Valley. Parking there is somewhat more limited, so you may want to carpool from the abundant R St parking to the Fern Valley lot. Our highlights there will be the pollinator garden (which has a lot of excellent nectar right now, including tithonia and Joe Pye weed), and there are usually good butterflies to be seen in the weedy verges and through the meadow areas. We’ll also walk (carefully so as not to get run over) downhill along the road from the Fern Valley lot and to the fields at the bottom of the hill.

We will return to the lot and enjoy lunch and questions at the picnic tables near the Youth Garden. There are restroom facilities here as well.

I will arrive early and scout a little bit to see if there are any especially hot spots elsewhere on the grounds.

It looks like the weather will be good for us, mostly sunny but on the warm side. Bring plenty of water to stay hydrated, wear sun protective clothing and/or sunscreen, and be sure to use insect repellent — there are plenty of ticks and chiggers to worry about. The bold among us might wade out into waist-high meadows so make sure you have good coverage. Long pants and closed-toed shoes with socks are recommended.

If the weather forecast changes, I will send out an email alert at 7 am tomorrow. We’ll keep to schedule unless it is actively raining. Otherwise I’ll just expect to see you at the Arboretum!

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A terrific field trip at the National Arboretum! We lost no one to heat stroke or snakebite or vehicular manslaughter, so I consider it a success. But we also had a very nice list of successfully identified confusing fall skippers (and a few other leps). And while I don’t want to rub it in, Liam and Tom and I did have another notable addition to the list during our leisurely walk back to the cars after lunch — CLOUDED SKIPPER. And an Orange Sulphur.

Herewith the full list (more or less in order of abundance):

Sachem (abundant) Hundreds

Silver-spotted Skipper (common) ~20

Zabulon Skipper (mostly females) 10

Northern Broken-dash 9

Fiery Skipper 5

Peck’s Skipper 5

Horace’s Duskywing 5

Little Glassywing 3

Dun Skipper 2

Ocola Skipper 2

Southern Broken-dash 1

Wild Indigo Duskywing 1

Least Skipper 1

Clouded Skipper (only seen by Rick, Liam, Tom) 1

and the highlight of the trip: LONG-TAILED SKIPPER

We also saw other butterflies, including Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, Spicebush Swallowtail (including a hiding caterpillar on spicebush found by Lisa), Eastern Tailed-blue, Gray Hairstreak, Cabbage White, Cloudless Sulphur, Orange Sulphur (Rick, Liam, Tom), Monarch, Red Admiral, Red-spotted Purple, Pearl Crescent, and Variegated Fritillary.

Pictures to come I’m sure from many of our ace photographers!

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Least Skipper surprisingly far from its normal wet ditch environment [photo Adrienne van den Beemt]

Fiery Skippers had not yet reached their usual astronomical numbers but we had good looks at both males and females [photo by Adrienne van den Beemt]

Female Zabulon Skippers were much more common than males on our field trip [photo by Adrienne van den Beemt]

Some of the best finds of the day were multiple Ocola Skippers [photo by Adrienne van den Beemt]

A second Ocola Skipper, opening up a bit [photo by Clare Alloca]

And Ocola with wings open enough to show the Star Trek insignia 🙂 [photo by Clare Alloca]

We all learned the mnemonic of Peck’s Skipper as the skipper that “gives you the finger” [photo by Adrienne van den Beemt]

Another view of Peck’s Skipper [photo by Clare Alloca]

We had both Northern and Southern Broken-dashes in the pollinator garden; this is one in the hazy in-between where the wing fringes are not *quite* distinct enough in differing colors for classic Southern (the fringes show wear) but I would lean toward Southern anyway [photo by Adrienne van den Beemt]

Another Southern Broken-dash showing a clear difference between the gray fringe on the forewing and the bright rusty fringe on the hindwing. This distinction shows up MUCH better in photos than it did under the bright sun in the pollinator garden, leading me to think we actually had more Southerns than Northerns in our visit [photo by Clare Alloca]

Undoubtedly the highlight of the field trip was this worn Long-tailed Skipper (with short tails, as is often the case with individuals that make it to the mid-Atlantic at the end of the summer]. The irridescent green is characteristic and sets it apart from Dorantes Long-tail, which has been showing up recently as well [photo by Clare Alloca]

Long-tailed Skipper showing more of the diagnostic irridescence [photo by Clare Alloca]

All the field trip participants were confident in their ability to suss out Sachems from the other grass skippers by the end of the field trip. Even this male didn’t fool them, light as the dark “thumbprint” on the lower HW is. [photo by Adrienne van den Beemt]

It wasn’t all skippers all the time, as this Gray Hairstreak attests [photo by Clare Alloca]