For those of you who are like me, and really miss
seeing butterflies around, here are a few pics that I took while I was at the shorebird workshop that I took back in August (8-8-08) in South Dakota .
This first picture is an example of a least skipper. You can identify the least skipper by the unmarked
hind wing as well as the black and white antennae. This looks like it is a male because it has a thin pointed abdomen. Females have a shorter abdomen.
Typically there are two broods of least skippers during the summer. The first brood is from the middle of June to the middle of July. The second is late July to late August. In the picture above the skippers are reproducing. Since this pic was taken in early August their offspring would be a part of the second brood.
The pearl crescent is another common butterfly in the upper
Midwest. They are called pearl crescents because of a light patch on their wings which is called a pearl. Unfortunately the butterfly in this pic is at the wrong angle for us to get a look at the pearl.
The clouded
sulphur is another common butterfly. Since they over winter in their
chrysalis they have a very long season. You can see clouded
sulphurs from May up into November.
When I first found this butterfly I was surprised and confused. It looked very much like it was an endangered
Karner blue butterfly, which are not typically found as far west as South Dakota.
When I got back home and began to go through the picks I looked it up in one of my butterfly field guides, I should have brought a butterfly field guide with even though it was a birding trip. I discovered that this was actually a Melissa blue butterfly.
The
Karner blue is an eastern subspecies of the Melissa blue. The Melissa blue is much more wide spread and not
threatened like the
Karner blue is. This mostly has to do with the fact that the
Karner Caterpillar will only eat parts of the lupine plant where the Melissa blue caterpillars eats various members of the pea family. Since the
Karner is dependent on the lupine they are more
susceptible to population decrease if there is less lupine around. Melissa blues are found in open fields and prairies from California to southwestern Minnesota.
I have visited the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge often over the past several years, however the refuge is broken up into several different units stretching southwest along the Minnesota River. Since I spend most of my time at the Long Meadow portion of the refuge, which includes the refuge headquarters, Bass Ponds, and Old Cedar Avenue Bridge, I decided to explore some of the other units this summer.
So on August 8th I headed down to the Rapids Lake unit of the Minnesota Valley NWR. The Rapids Lake unit is the newest edition to the refuge and it is located in Carver County, which is south of the Twin Cities. It is the only unit, other then Long Meadow, that has an interpretive visitors center, which you can see from the photo above has an impressive view.
The Rapids Lake unit consists of 1500 acres on the west bank of the Minnesota River. It has a variety of habitats including oak savanna, goat prairie bluffs, bottomland forests and restored wetlands. There are also three lakes in the unit, Long Lake, Horseshoe Lake and Rapids Lake, for which the unit is named for. Across the Minnesota River, on the east bank, sits the Louisville Swamp unit.
Much of this unit once belonged to the Gehl Family. The Gehls used the land to raise thousands of turkeys. Turkeys still roam the lands but now they are wild turkeys, all of the domestic birds were removed before they could bread with wild turkeys because the offspring would not be able to live on their own in the wild. The old Gehl farmhouse is just down the path from the visitors center.
One of the main reasons that I choose to visit this unit was because Carver County is one of many counties that needs some serious surveying for Odonata, dragons and damsels. I have spent quite a bit of time this summer volunteering with the Minnesota Odonata Survey Project trying to survey every county. This has included traveling to every corner of the state, but I was surprised to find that Carver County, which is only about 45 minutes from home, had less then 10 types of odonates on their county list.
I found several new species to add to the list including the common whitetail and 12 spotted skimmer, pictured above respectively, and lance-tipped darner, green darner, widow skimmer, blue dasher, white-faced meadowhawk, autumn meadowhawk and common pondhawk. I also found several types of damselfly that had not yet been surveyed.
Besides dragonfly I also saw butterflies, like these mating common sulphur, belted kingfisher, herons and a couple of other types of birds. Unfortunately the heat that day was pretty unbearable, with a 110 degree heat index, so I did not stay very long. I will need to make another trip back down, maybe during the fall bird migration.
