Author: AWG Photo

Well, certainly not our best day for butterflies. We decided to go to Sebastian Inlet to look for Mangrove Skippers and Mangrove Buckeyes. While we saw both, I only managed photos of the Buckeye. Mangrove Skippers are apparently quite fast and skittish.

It was hot and sunny. Mid 80’s and full sun all day. The kind of day when sunscreen just melts off of you and you end up with some amount of sunburn.

We started the day at the Sebastian Inlet campground area just to quickly look around the parking area. Not much going on there other then the obvious overabundance of Great Southern Whites. So we moved on back down A1A to the Sebastian Inlet Marina where there are bike and walking trails.

There wasn’t much here except 2 possible Mangrove Skippers flying and never landing, but they could have been anything really. Lots of Great Southern Whites again. There was a HUGE Southern Live Oak tree that we stopped to take a photo at.

We then took a quick trip to the Sebastian Inlet State Park which is directly across the water from the campground. It is a beach area which is pretty nice. Hoped to see some butterflies there, but there was very little going on. Just a tortoise and a cool lizard.

We decided to go back to the campground area where we knew Mangrove Skipper is found and walked the bike trail. There were some nice birds at the fishing pier at least. Wood Storks seem to love it there, along with Egrets, Pelicans, etc.

As far as the bile trail…big mistake (sort of). The trail goes for MILES and it is wide open (basically a dirt road) and is HOT. We saw two confirmed Mangrove Skippers which just hopped up and took off before we could think of lifting a camera. On the way back, hot, tired and just a bit moody, a Buckeye flew up towards us. I was able to follow it back and forth up and down the trail for a bit and get a few shots of it. Mangrove Buckeye (West Indian Mangrove Buckeye) which was one we had both never seen before. That was about the most positive part of the day. Well, we did stop for ice cream on the way back to the hotel. 🙂

Back at the hotel, I took a look around the flowers on the grounds and found a nice White Peacock. Not much else though.

Tomorrow we head to the western part of the state again and will more than likely have a bit of a down relaxing day once we get there. We’ll see. We always say that…

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!

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)

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)