How to report a butterfly

male Funereal Duskywing, photo by Bill Bouton

 

It's hard to imagine a more dramatic name than the Funereal Duskywing's (Erynnis funeralis). The name conjures up an image of a dreary black butterfly, possibly one whose preferred habitat is a graveyard. 

 

But let's be fair. This little guy is certainly not as dark as, say, a black swallowtail or pipevine swallowtail. 

Identifying the funereal is not as hard as identifying most Duskywing butterflies. It's hind wing shows a white fringe that's absolutely cheerful. No other butterfly in my area has this characteristic. I managed to get a photo that was good enough for identification, though not as gorgeous as the above photo by Bill Bouton, who shared his through Creative Commons.

I had a Funereal in the backyard a few years ago, before I knew that it was a rare species for my area. In the world of birders and butterfliers, "rare" means excitement. My mood was anything but mournful when I spotted it this time. The range map in Jeffrey Glassberg's Butterflies through Binoculars: The East shows the nearest population in central Kansas--500 miles or so west of my yard in Saint Louis Missouri. In Butterflies of North America, Kenn Kaufman and Jim Brock show it as uncommon as close as Rolla, MO--less than 100 miles from me.

I looked it up on Butterflies and Moths of North America. They include a map of reports, which showed a sighting as far north as the Illinois Wisconsin border. I decided to submit my report also. Their process is a little more rigorous and some citizen science websites. I'll go through the steps.

Step 1: In the menu of the website, click on "get involved." 

Step 2: Get a free account with Butterflies and Moths of North America (BAMONA for short). 

Step 3: Fill out the submission form online. You'll need to submit a photo of your butterfly or moth, and the photo needs to be cropped so that the insect fills the frame.  Stay with me here. This photo editing could be an obstacle but it doesn't need to be. I used to edit my photos on the photo-sharing website Flickr, with a free website/tool called Picnik. Picnik is no longer partnered with Flickr. They moved to Google+. Editing is still available on Flickr however, in a new tool called Aviary. Just use the action menu on the Flickr photo you want to edit. Of course you can also crop your photos with iPhoto or Google's Picasa--which looks a lot like Picnik. But wait! There's more. BAMONA also would like you to add your user name as a "watermark" to your photo. That's a lot easier than it sounds. Just use the text tool in the editing program you're using. Mine looked like this when I finished editing.

To complete the report you'll need to indicate on the map where the butterfly was seen. Just enter the address in the address box then check to see that the point on the map goes just where you want it. Finish by adding the state and county where you saw the butterfly or moth. 

Step 4: Wait anxiously for a reply from an expert in your region. The expert hopefully will confirm your report. My region's expert turned out to be a friend of mine, the chair of the entomology group of Webster Groves Nature Study Society.

Optional step 5: Send an email offering to let them use your photo on the website. The full instructions are on BAMONA.

 

 My thanks to you for staying with my blog. Now that I've cleared up the spam that led to my site being listed as "suspicious," I thought I'd better get cracking and write a post!

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Emma Peel as a Butterfly

Tiger Swallowtails are more beautiful, but when I spot a small, dark butterfly, I run for the camera! Small, dark butterflies include some of the most challenging identifications in our area, including the duskywings.

Jeffrey Glassberg, in Butterflies Through Binoculars; The East,  has the best quotation for this family in the spread-wing skipper butterfly group. He references a mysterious, unpublished text, The Rites of an Ancient Aurelian, by an anonymous author:

…and rising up like a dark cloud—the duskywings spread across the land, sowing confusion and dissension about butterfliers, the instrument of Erinnyes revenge.

Duskywing butterflies are tough to tell apart, but my task was somewhat limited by date and range for the butterfly in the photo above. I ruled out Juvenal's Duskywing, since it is only seen in spring in Missouri, and this fellow arrived on July 25. There is no dark band in the middle of the hind wing, so that eliminates Mottled Duskywing. Markings aren't right for Wild Indigo Duskywing, and in our area, we're too far south for Columbine and Persius; too far north for Zarucco and Funeral—though all 4 of these duskywings have occured here.
   
That leaves us with Horace's Duskywing—in this case, a male. However, I won't be offended if you find fault with my identification. Please leave your criticism in the comments!

I was lucky enough to have females in my yard this summer too, on July 11 and again on July 26. The female Horace's on July 26 was nectaring on one of the plants we love to hate, anglepod or climbing milkweed (Cynanchum laeve), which I wrote about in an earlier post.

What's up with the names of these butterflies? They must have been named by a classics scholar. Horace, Juvenal, and Persius were poets of ancient Rome.

Horace is most famous for the phrase, "Carpe diem!"—Seize the day! Juvenal's best known phrases include "A sound mind in a sound body," and—my favorite—"rare bird." Persius coined another great aphorism "Out of the frying pan, into the fire!" Though some sources suggest that all duskywings are named for Roman poets, I believe only these three are, though Columbine is a character in Medieval Commedia dell'Arte. The genus name, Erynnis, however is a reference to the three ancient Greek goddesses. The Erinyes, known to the Romans as "the Furies," punished criminals, especially murderers and those who were rude to his mother—Orestes, for example.

Emma Peel

The Erinyes are often depicted in black robes with short skirts, wearing boots, and carrying a whip—a bit like Emma Peel in The Avengers. A pretty intense name for an innocent little butterfly, don't you think?

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Songs of Summer and Scarlet

On June 11 and 12 I did more breeding bird surveys at Busch Memorial Conservation Area in St. Charles Co., Missouri, with my friend Kevin Renick. We didn't see the numbers of butterflies I mentioned in my previous post, but we saw and heard some great birds, including two not commonly seen: a Blue Grosbeak along the dam at Lake 37, and a brief view of a Blue-winged Warbler at the same spot.

Kevin is a singer-songwriter as well as a whiz at birding; his musical abilities extend into his nature hobby. What impressed me most this weekend was Kevin's ability to consistently tell the difference between the songs of the Scarlet Tanager and the Summer Tanager. Both birds nest here in oak-hickory forests of Missouri, and although their calls are very different, their songs are very much alike. I asked him to summarize the differences between the two songs. I'm accompanying Kevin's summary with video from the incomparable recordist of nature sounds, Lang Elliot.



Kevin's hints: "The Scarlet Tanager's song has sometimes been described as being like a 'robin with a sore throat.' It's a melodic warble, but it has a prominent screechy or raspy sound on one or two notes of its phrasing. The Summer Tanager on the other hand, is not raspy at all. It's a clear, sweet warble, a bit gentler than the Scarlet."



If you hear the bird's call—as opposed to its song—you've got it made. The Summer's call begins this video: "Picky-tucky-tuck." The Scarlet Tanager call, heard in the middle of his video, is "Chick-burrr. Chick-burrrr." David Sibley, author of The Sibley Guide to Birds, says that the Summer's song includes, "brief but distinct pauses between phrases." The Scarlet's by contrast is made up of a "fairly rapid, continuous series."

Thanks to Kevin Renick for his song analysis and to Lang Elliot for making his videos available.

The Crossley ID Guide

Cape May Warbler in The Crossley ID Guide, p. 411 alongside Birds of America, plate 95

I got my copy of The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds this week. Lots of well-known bloggers and experts have reviewed it as well, which I have linked to below. I'm not qualified to debate whether a the photo for the 1st-winter Glaucous-winged Gull is adequately differentiates it from the 1st-winter Thayer's Gull. However, if the target audience for this book is the average birder who gets out into the field when the demands of work and family allow; an average birder who'd like to improve her birding skills, then I'm eminently qualified. A better question might be, given that there are already a half-dozen excellent field guides to birds of the US, is this new book useful to me? I answer, enthusiastically, yes!

You're not gonna get this book into the pocket of your birding vest—it's bigger than The Joy of Cooking. I own only one bird book that larger and heavier than The Crossley ID Guide: the reprint of the 1917 Birds of America I got for Christmas in 1965. Edited by T. Gilbert Pearson, with color plates by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, its dust jacket proclaims in all caps, "This is the perfect, permanent bird book for all ages." Did the publisher mean it was perfect for a 14-year old as well as a 41-year old? Stone Age as well as Bronze Age? Industrial as well as Digital?

Like Fuertes' published paintings in Birds of America, Richard Crossley's plates are large, showing the species shown in its typical habitat. Crossley is not a painter however, his color plates are composite photos. Numerous photos of the bird are set against a background of the typical habitat. In the foreground of the of the composition appear a few close-up photos of the bird, each in a different plumage. In many plates, the middle ground displays several images of the bird in flight. In the distance are proportionally small images of the same species. Crossely's purpose is to pack as much identification information about the species into one scene as he can; how it may appear in flight, at rest from the side, viewed from the front when feeding, in the distance where streaks seem to blend into a wash of color.

At first I found these scenes a bit like a backlot studio shot in an old movie—I was distracted by the background. The more I looked at the page however, the more the images appeared 3-dimensional. Crossley is not trying to depict field marks. He asks the reader to look over the complete image, focusing first on this bird, then that, putting those photos of variable plumages and postures into context. In Japanese films, the director often gives the audience a wider shot than we're used to with Hollywood movies; the viewer, not the director, decides what to look at within the frame. Crossley's approach is more Kurosawa than Corman.

It will take me a long time to go through this book, but I'll use one plate as an example of the role this book can play in your birding toolbox. When I first moved to Kirkwood in the 80s, I occasionally saw what I called "the mystery bird." Its wings were swept back like a gull, but the tail wasn't the right shape for a gull. Sometimes I'd see a distant bird with a leading edge so straight that it appeared to be headless. It's flight was so effortless and acrobatic, I thought it might be a falcon. All of these are shown in the tiny distance shots on page 239. 

Ruffed Grouse peers in from the dust jacket
to read the 1965 version of an interactive comment.

The fact that I can point you toward that page whether you own the book or not is another feature of this birding guide that Peterson and Pearson never dreamed of; it's interactive! I can try to soak it all the images on the printed page, but if I need more information, I can find it with a click on the website. The web version has labels, comments, and questions not included in the book. Of course, you can "like" it, make comments, or leave questions for the author on Facebook too. Adjusted for inflation, at $8.95, Birds of America was roughly 3 times the Amazon price of The Crossley ID Guide!
  


If you wrote about this book on the web and I haven't listed you below, I'd love it if you'd comment and give us the link!
10,000 Birds
The Bird Chaser and second post
Audubon Magazine
Birdzilla.com
Monarch's Nature Blog
The Bird Booker Report
Sapsucker Woods (gift shop of Cornell U)
What Bird Forum

Photos & Friends, Skippers & Moths

Northern Broken-Dash Skipper? AMcC

I had planned to do a third post on Silphiums, but there are too many butterflies in the garden for that! It’s all the more exciting since this summer has not been the best for butterflies. I don’t know if it’s been the weather, my garden, or the truck that sprayed mosquitoes (and every other living thing) on my street in late June. Whatever the problem, butterfly numbers seem to be recovering. Skippers are everywhere.

Skippers are small, fast-flying butterflies. Compared to the wings, the head is large—kind of cute if you get to see it well. Most are golden-brown or brown and frustrating to identify. It’s been said that skippers are the Empidonax of the butterfly world. (That last sentence actually means something to birders.) If you’re going to have any chance at all identifying skippers, you’ll need a good butterfly book with range maps and a close focusing set of binoculars. See my list of “Favorite Nature and Gardening Books” below. Having a digital camera and an expert friend to study the photo are probably required for some skippers.

I’ve had a new species in the yard this week that I tentatively identified as Northern Broken-Dash Skipper. I sent a photo to my friend Yvonne to see what she thinks. Northern Broken-Dash and Little Glassywing are very similar and my yard is within the range of both. The larvae of both eat grass. According to Glassberg’s Butterflies through Binoculars: The East, Little Glassywing’s caterpillars eat purpletop grass. I don’t have any purpletop in my yard, but it is common and probably can be found 1/2 mile from my house. Northern Broken-Dash caterpillars prefer switch grass. I have switch grass; in fact, it’s growing all around the skipper in the picture. The plant is Panicum virgatum ‘Prairie Sky.’ Maybe you have an opinion about the skipper in the photo you’d like to leave as a comment!

Female Fiery Skipper AMcC

My most common little guy is the Fiery Skipper. The one in this photo is a female, and she really confused me for a while. I seem to see mostly males.

Early this morning I saw a new species visiting my cup plant. It looked like a moth, but was behaving very much like a butterfly. I looked through Butterflies and Moths of Missouri, but couldn’t find it. I sent a shot of it to one of my favorite Flickr groups, ID Please. Members view the shared photos and give their opinion through the comments below the photo. To use this tool, you first need to join Flickr (it’s free), upload your photo, join the group, and then share it. I also sent the photo to What’s that Bug?, a website that features pages of insect photos and discussion. If you have an insect you’d like to identify, look for the “Ask What’s that Bug” page. Two more great sites to exploe are The Bug Guide and the North American Moth Photographers Group.

Corn Earworm Moth AMcC

While waiting for a response from these websites, I tidied up my desk. That when I accidentally came across a photo in Kaufman’s Field Guide to Insects of North America. I’d forgotten that 35 pages of moths are included in that book. So I’ve identified my mystery moth as one of the Owlet Moths, the Corn Earworm moth. I’ve mentioned two good books for butterfly identification but books devoted to moths, with photos or drawings of living critter are not so easy to find. I’m looking forward to the spring 2012 publication of Moths of Northeastern North America by David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie. While you’re waiting, you might want to check out Seabrooke’s blog, “the Marvelous in Nature,” “North American Moths,” or the “blog carnival” dedicated to moths, “The Moth and Me,” most recently hosted at “The Skeptical Moth.”

Wordle

Are they edible?

Those pesky stinkhorns sure are conversation-starters! I’ve had several people ask if they are edible, and the answer seems to be “Yes,” and “No.” Tom Volk’s  “Fungus of the Month” article says that they are, with certain cooking techniques. Another source, “Wildman” Steve Brill found them to be revolting, even when cooked in broth. The totally amazing 2006 BBC series Planet Earth had a time lapse video of a Netted Stinkhorn’s growth. I’d love to embed the video, but the embedding is disabled. Click this link, or better yet, watch Planet Earth. I came across a discussion on this topic at GardenWeb. I was glad to see at least one gardener recognized that they are harmless, interesting mushrooms. Just think of them as “fun-guy!” Thanks for all the comments and photos!