Despite the weather impacting the butterfly flights in the east this season there have been some highlights. One of those came in Northern Florida where Barry Marts, Mike Smith, Tom Pendleton and I visited a couple of locations in hopes of finding a couple of lifers. This whole trip was inspired by the great article that Bill Berthet wrote for the Fall/Winter 2017 edition of American Butterflies (NABA). He explained the showed the many treasures found at Ralph E. Simmons State Forest in northern eastern Florida. Simmons NF. Our main target was Dusky Roadside-Skipper, a rare open Pine woods skipper and one we all had missed on multiple trips to North Carolina. We contacted Bill for some specific information and he offered to meet us there and act as a tour guide for a day. We gratefully accepted. I’m happy to report that not only did we find about 5-6 Dusky Roadside-Skippers but also came across a satyr looking very much like the recently described Intricate Satyr (H. intricata). A report on this species can be found here: Subtle Satyrs. All of us took several ventral and dorsal of candidates at Simmons NF and also at our second location, Suwannee State Park near Live Oak, FL, which we visited the following day. I sent my best candidate photos to Tom Austin from South Carolina who is getting ready to publish an article on Carolina and Intricate Satyrs in the southeast. He commented with:
“The Florida populations can sometimes be a bit hazy to ID from ventral surfaces but these individuals are all close to the type morphology and your photos are excellent quality. Which makes my job easy. I’d say all the photos you sent me are of Intricate Satyrs. The last dorsal shot is 100% verifiable as a male Intricate Satyr. When you’ve got a dead on dorsal shot, like yours below, it’s fairly straightforward to sex the genus. Males, like the below, have a skinny finger-like (or hotdog shaped) abdomen that’s thinner than the thorax. Females have an elliptical abdomen that’s the same-width as the thorax. This ID gets harder if you’re off to one side or the other more than 30 degrees.”
After a very successful day at Simmons NF we opted to drive the next day about 2 hrs (we stayed in Kingsland, GA) to Suwannee State Park where Mike, Barry and I had searched unsuccessfully for Neamathla Skipper the last couple a years. It is a small uncommon to rare (IMO) grass skipper whose range runs along the gulf states. After searching for over an hour we finally located a very fresh individual in a roadside ditch. Hot, dehydrated and happy we spent a few more hours walking around the state park before heading back to the hotel. We worked hard for these species and had some great help from Bill at Simmons NF. All in all it was a great trip as we tallied between 45 and 50 species over the two days.
Click on any image below to enlarge
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