May 28, 2025 – Francis Crane WMA

We took a quick trip to Francis Crane Wildlife Management Area in Falmouth, MA today since it was supposed to be cloudy and instead it was sunny! Not an ideal day with quite a stiff breeze going on, but temps in the upper 60’s and sun, and we are going SOMEWHERE!

Our main target species were Cloudywings. Northern and Southern regularly appear here, although I suspect that Northern are declining somewhat rapidly at the location for some reason. We also wanted to check out the Cicadas (Brood XIV is emerging this year) and the Baltimore Checkerspot caterpillars to see how they were both doing. Turns out they are doing quite well! There were hundreds of each, so no worries there.

We did manage to find some Cloudywings and all were Southern Cloudywings. That was great, but furthers my concern for Northerns. One thing we did find was one Southern looking for a place to lay eggs. It was searching all over and paid no attention to us. When a butterfly does this, it is typically a female looking for a suitable host plant to lay it’s eggs on. This one did find a plant it liked and laid an egg. I was reluctant to change lenses to my macro to get a photo of the egg, but I am glad I did.

We also managed a few other species on the walk. American Lady, Common Buckeye, Dusted Skippers (photo above) and others were seen. Another halfway decent day in the field and we were only there about a little over an hour!