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Today was a sort of freestyle day where we had a couple spots chosen and then hit a couple more since they were all in the same area. Not much driving, thankfully. Driving around here generally sucks to put it nicely. However, the nature areas are generally pretty awesome!

The day was forecast to be a hot one. Mid 90’s or so. So we started the day a little earlier in a neighborhood in Brandon that has a nice row of privet hedge at the beginning of it. Last year, it produced several hairstreak butterflies and this year didn’t disappoint! We found several Southern Oak Hairstreaks, two Fulvous Hairstreaks and a Monk Skipper. There was another small skipper that flew off quickly and we never got an ID on.

On the way back to the car, we found a Fiery Skipper and a Ceraunus Blue in the small flowers along the road and a Common Gallinule duck in the pond.

From here we headed south a tiny bit (20 minutes) to the Fred and Idah Preserve in Gibsonton, FL. Last year, this place was really active. This year was not so much. There was still plenty of nectar, just not much flying. The main nectar flowers here are 2 different colors of Lantana. We have found that the pink variety seems to attract the most butterflies, but the orange does work as well. We saw a few Cloudless Sulphurs, Zebra Longwings (not stopping for a photo), both a Common Checkered White and a Tropical Checkered Skipper, a Monk Skipper and a Fiery Skipper here.

Still not satisfied with our findings (and realizing this is our last day here for a while) we went down to Apollo Beach Preserve to see if there were any Mangrove Skippers there. The place (for butterflies) was basically a dud. Not much going on with a lot of the area we may have searched undergoing habitat reconstruction. I still managed to find a Common Buckeye and a Ceraunus Blue.

Striking out there, we decided to go to the Manatee Viewing Center in Apollo Beach. We figured if there aren’t any butterflies around, at least we will see a manatee. We barely got out of the parking lot and onto the property when we saw a Mangrove Skipper in the small group of flowers at the entrance! Finally! It wasn’t the BEST looking individual with one wing sort of tattered, but the other wing was nice so the photos I got of that side came out decently. There was also a Fiery Skipper here. As for manatees? None.

After all of this, we went to DQ, got some food and ice cream and headed back to the hotel. Tomorrow we fly home, but it has been a heck of a trip with an as of yet unknown number of species seen. Perhaps that is something for a post for tomorrow. From here on out, I will be updating this for our Massachusetts adventures, but those typically don’t start until the beginning of May.

UPDATE: Looking for some kind of redeeming quality of this hotel, I walked around it several times at 4pm-5pm and found a few species. One, I only got a fuzzy phone pic of but iNaturalist is saying it is a Three-spotted Skipper! I tend to believe it as iNat is generally correct even with the smallest of detail in a photo, but I sure would have liked an actual in focus photo. I also saw two Gulf Fritillaries and 1 Horace’s Duskywing. Not bad for just walking the hotel parking lot.

Today was supposed to mainly be a driving day to get back to the west coast of the state. However, we decided to find a place to stop and check out along the way. I chose Sumica in Polk County. Let me start by saying that if you don’t take the major highways across the state, you get to go on backroads that are lined with farms and just about nothing for cars. It is actually quite nice, although it takes a bit longer. Sumica is in the middle of nowhere on rt 60.

Initially, this place looked good for butterflying as the main trail before it splits had a few thistle plants along it with one of them having a Palmetto Skipper on it. That is pretty much where the trail butterflying ends though. The trails are wide and clean, but there is absolutely nothing for butterflies to nectar on. No flowers at all. So after a little bit of walking, we decided to just head to the car and find another place. On the way back to the car, there was a Twin-spot Skipper on one of the thistles, a Dainty Sulphur on a low flower, and I managed to find a mating pair of whirlabouts and a Checkered White in the parking lot area.

Lauren found a nice place along the way that would have some nice flowers available called Bok Tower Gardens. It was only about 20 minutes west of Sumica, so it was in the direction we were going anyways. At $20 per person entry fee, I figured it had better be good! It ended up being somewhat of a downer for butterflies, but the place is really neat! The central attraction is a huge tower that has 60 bells that play songs for 1/2 hour at 1pm and 3pm each day. It was really pretty cool and we took a few minutes to listen to it.

As for butterflies here, we found quite a few species, but nothing in big numbers except the Atala. There is one holly tree in there that has several dozen of them in it, on it and all around it! These small butterflies are always fun to see. We had only seen them once a few years back at the Holiday Inn Vacation Club in Cocoa Beach. Since we know the host plant of Atala, the Coontie plant, we found those and were able to find the caterpillars and chrysalids of them as well.

Other species we saw there were:

Cloudless Sulphur (always flying, never landing)
Giant Swallowtail (always flying, never landing)
Zebra Longwing (always flying, never landing)
Monarchs
Long-tailed Skipper
Black Swallowtail
Gulf Fritillary

When we got to the hotel (La Quinta Inn in Brandon, FL) we soon saw that we got what we paid for (we paid for the hotel in points, not money) as the place is a bit of a dump, but we had plans with Rebekka, my neice to go out to dinner. She suggested a restaurant called Circles in Apollo Beach. It was great to see her and catch up on things and the dinner was great! The restaurant is right on the water and is really nice.

Tomorrow, we go to a special row of hedges that we know produced some amazing hairstreaks last year and then off to the Fred & Idah Schultz Nature Preserve for the rest of the day.

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)