Butterfly Lightning

If you want to know how I figured out that the white flower I was seeing everywhere on damp roadsides near salt/brackish marsh is Bidens pilosa, Spanish needles, I Googled “white composite flower Florida” and went through a kazillion photos until I found it. Yay Google. Yay me. Yay Spanish needles! The butterflies were all over it, all the time.

 Great southern white, Ascia monuste. Best said with a slow Virginia drawl. Say it: “Gret Suthrun whaat.” (thanks, John Acorn.)  Enjoying Spanish needles again, they are.  My Kaufman butterfly guide says antennal clubs usually pale blue-green…yep! Who knew? Until now?

 Gulf Fritillary Agraulis vanillae. These vivid beauties take fritillary orange and add a dash of chile.  Za-zing! And they’re everywhere, mingling with the gret suthrun whaats. To me, they look like a frit crossed with a heliconian (see below).

This one puzzled me. There are lots of yellows in the Deep South that we don’t have up to home.
I had to look it up. Turns out to be a  Barred Yellow, (winter form), Eurema daira.

This little beauty was flitting through longleaf pine forest at Tosohatchee NWR, a huge complex of wooded pine swamp and riverine forest and prairie that is crawling with great wildlife and birds.
 I was lucky enough to lead a morning’s trip there for the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival.
You can see a peek of the clear sulfur-yellow of this barred yellow’s forewing in this shot.

Salt marsh skipper, Panoquina panoquin.  Distinguished by its elongated narrow wings, which make it a panoquin amongst the skippers. I need to find out the derivation of that word. I like it. Hang tight…dang it! Can’t find the derivation. Kinda sounds Greek. Help, somebody?

Zebra longwing Heliconius charithonia. I will never forget seeing my first zebra longwing on a visit back to where I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, in the mid 1980′s. It must’ve been a late fall stray northward, but I didn’t know that. All I knew was that I saw a vision of tropical loveliness floating on shallow wingbeats through a powerline cut in a pine forest along the James River. I had no idea what it was or even how to find out, but it burned itself into my brain–how could it not?  Now I know. I smile every time I see a heliconian, first because they’re beautiful and second because when I see heliconians I am usually in the tropics, and I’m smiling nonstop anyway. But I also think back to that day, when a bolt of lepidopteran lightning struck me in the Virginia pinewoods.

I am so grateful for the Google. Now I can almost always find out what it is I’ve seen. I can put names to things. And that is the greatest luxury and most nourishing food for a curious Science Chimp. Even if it takes years to do it, the most delicious thing for me is to learn.

 Common Buckeye Junonia coenia. I was looking for mangrove buckeyes but failed to find any. This butterfly makes this Buckeye feel at home. We have oodles of ‘em in autumn. Florida’s winter ones are much less colorful than ours.

Do you have oodles of us?

No, sir, we don’t, and I’m very glad to see one of you on almost every lamppost on every bridge. Blown away, in fact, and reeling. It is a fine world we live in, where ospreys are as common as gulls. That speaks well for the fish, and for the bay, and for the people of Florida.

Julie Zickefoose is a painter and writer who lives on a nature sanctuary in Appalachian Ohio. She is the author of Letters from Eden and The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds With Common Birds, due in spring 2012. http://juliezickefoose.blogspot.com