Well, after a morning of fixing the heating system in the house at 2:20am, hitting the road at 3:30am, arriving in Florida at 9:30am and going out two two different areas searching for butterflies, we are exhausted!
Our butterfly adventure began at the Aripeka Sandhills Preserve. It was supposed to start at the Withlacoochie Bay Trail, but the best laid plans don’t always work out and that area of the state had several thunderstorms roll through it all day. So, we decided on Aripeka since the weather was forecast to be relatively decent with partial sun and temps in the upper 70’s.
Aripeka is a nice place. Small enough to walk around the whole thing (our whole walk was 2.26 miles) and the butterflies were there. Not many, but better than Massachusetts!
As far as the butterflies, we initially ran across a Common Buckeye which I had seriously hoped was a Mangrove Buckeye, but it didn’t turn out to be. Shortly after that Lauren found a Giant Yucca Skipper egg, a species we are certainly searching for! Later in the walk, she also found a hatched egg and two caterpillars. No adults, but we are on to them!
Another interesting individual was a Gulf Fritillary ovipositing on a dead twig. No idea why it would do that, but we got the proof of it.
The rest of the species we saw at Aripeka include:
Zebra Longwings
Giant Swallowtails
Palamedes Swallowtails
Barred Sulphurs
Phaon Crescents
From here we moved on to the Weekiwachee Preserve, mainly to kill time while the storms moved through up north in Lecanto. There was the possibility of Mangrove Skipper, so we gave it a shot.
The weather at this point had become cloudy and thunder could be heard way off in the distance, so we spent very little time here, only exploring one path off to the left, a little bit down the main trail.
Most of what we saw was on the main trail. The side trail did turn up one very nice looking Gulf Fritillary, but nothing else really. Unfortunately, no Mangrove Skipper was seen. Tomorrow we will get over to the Withlacoochie Bay Trail and then down to Bull Creek WMA!
The species we saw at Weekiwachee (with corresponding photos below) were:
Dainty Sulphur
Gulf Fritillary
Whirlabouts
Phaon Crescents (some VERY small)
Our Natural Adventures 
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