Florida 3-31-25

Today we made it to the Withlacoochie Bay Trail that we wanted to go to yesterday. The day started out foggy in the upper 70’s and we didn’t have a lot of hope for seeing anything until that burned off.

However, just a little ways down the trail, we found a Sweadner’s Juniper Hairstreak in the same exact spot that there was one last year. Last year I didn’t get a photo though. This year I did. Having my handy Pringles can flash modifier REALLY helped with this! The first photo here is without the flash, the second is with the flash.

After finding that, which was our first target species of the day, we decided to drive all the way down to the parking lot at the far end, near the ocean to look for our second target species, the Eastern Pygmy Blue. To make the story a bit shorter, we didn’t have any luck with this one, but we did find quite a few nice species including 2 other ones we had never seen, the Saltmarsh Skipper and an Aaron’s Skipper! These came out once the sun was shining and the day started heating up.

The other species we saw at the end of the trail were:

Several Buckeyes
A couple Red Admirals
Many more Sweadner’s Juniper Hairstreaks
A Question Mark
A couple Gulf Fritillaries
A Giant Swallowtail
We also ran into a very cool black racer snake which was hunting lizards (it didn’t catch any)

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