Skippers: Hiding in Plain Sight
Phenology – “a branch of science concerned with the relationship between climate and periodic biological phenomena (as the migration of birds or the flowering and fruiting of plants).”
Skippers? What’s a Skipper?
That’s a fair question, one that is easily answered. Skippers are butterflies. In fact, the skipper family includes nearly three hundred U.S species and several thousand more that are found all over the world. If you look in the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Butterflies, you will find that a quarter of the 39 color plates are devoted to skippers. The largest are nearly the size of a monarch, a half dozen have tails much more dramatic than those we admire on swallowtails, and dozens of them have fascinating wing patterns.
So why haven’t you heard of them? Why don’t you ever walk through a field and hear something like “Oh, there’s one of those cute skippers sipping nectar from those nice yellow flowers?” If you look more closely at Peterson’s Field Guide, you will quickly discover that all but one of the large, long-tailed skippers are tropical butterflies that only range as far north as southern Florida or Texas. The only exception is the Silver Spotted Skipper that I frequently see on Joe Pye Weed and other large flowering plants in the Upper Meadow. This skipper can have a wingspan of well over two inches, and the prominent white spots on the underside of its wings make any curious observer rush to their guidebook to discover the name of this fascinating, well-named insect.
August 2, 2019. Two silver spotted skippers feeding on the many-blossomed Joe Pye Weed that covers the little hill beside the Pond.
Unfortunately for those of us in the North Country, none of our other common skippers challenge the silver-spotted in terms of both size and beauty. Most of them are too small and too drab to notice. The only thing that might catch your attention is the way they hold their wings when resting or feeding on a flower. Their forewings are spread out like those of other butterflies, but their hindwings are held straight up, as shown below in one of my first photos of a small skipper.
August 3, 2006. The rear wings of this skipper are almost vertical, which is a characteristic of the small skippers in our area.
I took this photo in 2006, but it was only last week that I decided that it was probably a female Dun Skipper, as its white spots are a little smaller than those on the dark wings of the female Broken-Dash or the female Little Glassywing. I am not the only one who has found it difficult to distinguish among the females of these three species, as my guidebook refers to them as the “three black witches.”
I claim to be a careful observer of butterflies and dragonflies, but it wasn’t until my seventh summer in Sugar Hill that I even mentioned skippers in my journal, and it was another summer before I managed to identify one of them as an Indian Skipper. It turns out that Indian skippers are commonly found on trails through fields in and around Sugar Hill. For many years, I was content to mention just three types of skippers in my journals: Silver-Spotted Skippers, Indian Skippers, and just plain skippers.
July 11, 2004 75 degrees, partly cloudy, beautiful. When I took a walk down Georgeville Road, I found plenty of butterflies: comma, fritillary, wood satyr, wood nymph and an orange skipper that I later identified as an Indian skipper.
It wasn’t until 2016 that I took the photo that ignited my interest in small skippers. That July, I was walking along the Ammonoosuc Rail Trail in Lisbon, just below the old pin-truss railroad bridge, when I noticed an unusual skipper. Instead of the red/orange tones of the Indian Skipper or the plain drab brown of the three witches, its wings had large yellow spots. Well, I happily spent a few minutes working to get a good photo of this interesting creature. As soon as I returned home, I went to my Peterson Field Guide, and I soon found that the orange pattern on this butterfly’s wings was enough to identify it as a Hoary Edge. According to my 1998 field guide, this butterfly’s range extended from northern Florida to central New England, but did not include the North Country. However, the orange pattern on its wings is unmistakable. So, either this Hoary Edge was an adventurous tourist or the range of this species is now above the notches. I was naturally quite excited to get a photo of a creature that was supposed to be found only with the flatlanders.
June 14, 2016. A Hoary Edge posed next to the Ammonoosuc Rail Trail in Lisbon.
Identifying a Hoary Edge found north of its purported range encouraged me to start taking the skippers seriously. Instead of ignoring the inconspicuous brownish butterflies often seen sitting on clover or ferns or leaves as I walk through the fields of Sugar Hill, I began to look for photo opportunities.
July 2, 2019. I was sitting at Rufus’s Cabin on Bronson Hill when I noticed a couple of skippers just beyond the mown area in front of my bench. Within a few minutes, I had taken several photos, and I realized that there were multiple species of skippers flitting all around the edge of this field.
One of the skippers that I photographed that day had a strangely shaped yellow pattern on its wings that clearly identified it as a Peck’s Skipper.
Since then, I have photographed more than a dozen other species of small skippers in or around Sugar Hill. However, getting the photos of different species is sometimes easier than identifying them, since many species seem to have nearly identical twins. It takes a long time to comb through the ten dozen or so photos in the field guide trying to match the smallest details of a photo to the key characteristics of the candidate species.
For example, several species have colors and wing patterns similar to those of the Indian Skipper, and I have undoubtedly overlooked many a colorful skipper because I thought that it was just another Indian Skipper. The Long Dash is almost identical to the Indian Skipper, but the black stripe on its wings is a little different. The Least Skipper has the same orange and brown colors, but lacks the black stripes. These differences are much easier to see in these larger-than life photographs than when you’re ten feet away watching them flit from one leaf or blossom to another!
July 9, 2021. A Long Dash
August 27, 2019. A least skipper on a stalk of grass on our dam.
And then there are the look-alike species, such as the Duskywings, whose splotchy wings make them difficult to differentiate even if you do have a good photo. I think I have correctly identified the two species pictured below, but I could be wrong. If you have a field guide, perhaps you can correct me or assure me that I am correct.
August 8, 2021. A Dreamy Duskywing on daisies in the Upper Meadow.
September 4, 2023. A Juvenal’s Duskywing on daisies in the Upper Meadow.
Better yet, rather than wasting too much time trying to identify the dismal duskywings and black witches, you could simply keep an eye out for the small skippers with dramatic colors, such as this Delaware Skipper that visited Sugar Hill during the Covid shutdown.
July 16, 2020. Unless you look closely, this Delaware skipper appears to have only two wings. This is one of the few small skippers whose wing patterns may attract your attention!
