While we had to postpone our annual butterfly count by a day due to the weather, it was definitely for the better! 48 people came out to help count butterflies on Sunday, August 3rd from 9:00 in the morning to about 4:30 in the afternoon.
We identified 2,903 individual butterflies and 55 species! This is the highest number of different species that we’ve identified in our 12 years of counting and some of the species were real rarities like the Clouded skipper, which was a first for our count, the Giant Swallowtail, which we only see every few years, the American Snout (shown above) and the high number of Juniper Hairstreaks. Two species that were noticeably down in numbers include the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail and the Red-spotted Purple. We’ve posted a Full Report for the day as well as a Summary of the Data for all 12 years – click on over to find out more about what we saw.
Many thanks to everyone who came out to spot and count butterflies and to our leaders (Jon Little, Cliff Fairweather, Mona Miller, Bob Blakney, Larry Meade, Dirck Harris, Phil Daley, and Nicole Hamilton) who made this possible!