Dear Wood Folk, I suppose northern viceroys get overlooked a lot due to their twin being perhaps the most popular butterfly in North America. At first glance they sure look like a petite monarch. Viceroy (limenitis archippus) is a poisonous butterfly mimicking another poisonous butterfly that mimics it. Or it goes something like that. They call … [Read more…]
Dear Wood Folk, Around Haliburton, Ontario we have 4 comma butterflies: the green comma (polygonia faunus), eastern comma (polygonia comma), gray comma (polygonia progne), and the question mark (polygonia interrogationis). They are all sorted into the genus polygonia. They stand out with their angular wing edges from lookalike crescents and fritillaries. But they are very … [Read more…]
Dear Wood Folk, A while back we covered the red admiral, who despite the shared moniker admiral, is quite different from the white AKA red-spotted purple admiral (limenitis arthemis) we’re featuring today. They aren’t even in the same family! Surprisingly, today’s featured “admiral” is more closely related to monarchs. The appearance of limenitis arthemis is … [Read more…]
Dear Wood Folk, The silvery checkerspot (chlosyne nycteis) looks a lot like a northern or pearl crescent, and sometimes it’s called a silvery crescent. These crescents are hard to tell apart, especially the females. You can see pictures of the silvery on iNat. It appears to be dotted with white spots, unlike the northern and pearl. … [Read more…]
Dear Wood Folk, The dreamy duskywing (erynnis icelus) is another skipper butterfly. We’ve covered the more orangey skippers in a previous diary, and the endangered mottled duskywing in another. Dreamy has a close lookalike in the more commonly seen Juvenal’s duskywing (erynnis juvenalis) and the rarer columbine duskywing (erynnis lucilius). All three of which are found … [Read more…]
Dear Wood Folk, In Ontario, we have three crescent butterflies. The two main crescents are the northern crescent (phyciodes cocyta) and pearl crescent (phyciodes tharos), who may or may not be the same species, although the current line of thought is that they are separate species. That might flip flop. And third is the tawny … [Read more…]