We visited the Herky Huffman / Bull Creek WMA today. This is an amazingly HUGE property with butterflies everywhere! Many thanks to Linda Cooper, Ed Perry and Nancy Prine for spending the ENTIRE day out there (9am-5pm) in the heat! We wouldn’t have seen half the stuff without you all.
The day started out SUPER foggy (the fog here is thicker than Cape Cod’s) but that quickly burned off and the sun came out as temps went into the mid to upper 80’s. Luckily, this is a place where you drive most of the time and get out to see butterflies for a bit and drive some more. Our target species for the day were just about any of the many skippers we had never seen and a Great Southern White. We managed to see up to 40 species in the 8 hours! The many photos will be posted below.
The property is really cool and includes “Gut Pit Road” (where hunters leave the guts of their kills) which has become a necessary place for a group photo over the years. Not AT the gut pit, but at the beginning of the road (thankfully!). Of course, we had to do it too! The old sign is now gone, but there is a less nice replacement. Photo to come soon.
It also has a little cemetery for Florida pioneers which we didn’t go in, but got to see it a bit from the outside of the fence. It is way out in the middle of nowhere.
Lunch break was a great little area of canopy which really took the heat off of us with it’s shade. Great place which also had butterflies flying around us the whole time (Carolina Satyrs, Zebra Swallowtails, etc).
Overall, this was a GREAT experience thanks to our gracious hosts. We also got to play ball with a sweet dog at the beginning of the trail!
It wouldn’t be Florida without a gator sighting at some point, and the one thing I surely didn’t think we would see out here was one of those. I was wrong, but it kept it’s distance as it swam away slowly.
As for the butterflies, a short list of just some of the cool ones we saw would be:
Georgia Satyr
Carolina Satyr
Queen
Little Yellow
Great Southern White
Little Metalmark
Arogos Skipper
Palmetto Skipper
Zebra Swallowtail
Spicebush Swallowtail
Palamedes Swallowtail
Gray Hairstreak
Southern Broken Dash
Juvenal’s Duskywing
and SO many more!
Our Natural Adventures 
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