Full day with butterflies, moths and Seabrooke Leckie

May 7th we covered a lot of territory trying to find sunshine and butterflies. First, we went to Blackwater Falls and I took the trail at the end of the lake called the Western Maryland Rail Trail. Just past the bridge I walked up a short staircase to the top and walked along the trail.

I had never been up there before and was surprised to see more wetlands.

Tiger Swallowtails were flying quickly by but I did manage to photography this one.

The day before I had come to the realization that I needed to take photos of the underside of these Tigers in order to properly identify them. Some might be Appalachian Tiger Swallowtails but it was almost impossible to catch them.

I found a few Spring Azures and this Duskywing that I haven’t identified yet. It was looking as worn out as I was starting to feel after chasing the Tigers.

From there we drove to Camp 70 Road and stopped at a very large stone with this sign attached. There is a lot of interesting history of this area.

Lunch was nice but of course it started to rain before we could begin looking for more butterflies. Not ones to give up we slowly drove our way back and found a couple moments in the sun. There was a large migration of Red Admirals and we were seeing 5-10 at a time. Here is one along with a clearwing moth.

My best find for the afternoon was this Brown Elfin but by then it was time to leave if we were going to make it in time for the big event.

My main purpose for coming to the area a week before the Wildflower Pilgrimage was to meet Seabrooke Leckie, the author of the new Petersons Moth Field Guide. I love her blog and moths so I was excited about meeting her in person after corresponding with her through emails and bog comments. You can find her blog at: http://seabrookeleckie.com/blog. Be sure to visit, you will learn alot and enjoy her writing.

She signed my book…

…and I helped set three moth sheets before her talk.

After her talk we went out and collected moths for her to identify and I was very impressed with her knowledge. We were using the new field guide and found most of them right away and believe me that is so much better than the old way of looking everything up online.

Below is the Small-eyed Sphinx (Paonias myops) that we caught that night.