Folks:
I don't want to hear about how nice the weather was in the Carolinas
yesterday. Is it true it didn't rain on 98% of North Carolina yesterday?
The worst weather in the Carolinas was on mainland Dare County, where it
was even much worse than the predicted forecast of "mostly cloudy, 30
percent chance of rain, wind 10-15 mph, high 75". Well, it 30 percented
on us for about 2 hours -- 3 occasions for about 3/4 inch of rain, wind
15 to occasionally 20 mph, and maybe 10 percent sun, mainly after 3 pm;
fortunately, it did make it to 77 degrees late in the day. Oh, the
forecast didn't mention mosquitoes! My unofficial count was around
10,000,000. As I'm typing this, my body can account for a few hundred of
these!
Because of the crappy weather, the five brave souls -- Jeff Pippen,
Parker Backstrom, Lauren Elich, Mike Smith (from w. VA), and I --
decided not to have an official count, but try to just stick out the
rain, wind, clouds, and mosquitoes, and just see and photograph some
wetland skippers. In the process, we had two separate sightings of black
bears standing on roads, a Timber [Canebrake] Rattlesnake seen by
several folks, and saw almost all of our target species (except for
Berry's Skipper, whose nectar sources had nearly all been mowed or
bulldozed). By the time the day was over, we decided to go ahead and
call it an official count, for publication in NABA's count book, even
though we only hit 2-3 of our usual spots. Here are the totals (our
lowest species total ever, not because of low butterfly numbers, but
because of the poor weather and lack of locales surveyed ):
E. Tiger Swallowtail 3
Palamedes Swallowtail 100
Cloudless Sulphur 40 very low
Sleepy Orange1
Great Purple Hairstreak 8
Gray Hairstreak 12
Red-banded Hairstreak 80
E. Tailed-Blue 1
Pearl Crescent 15
Common Buckeye 10 yep -- no ladies or Red Admiral
Red-spotted Purple 3
Viceroy 4
Southern Pearly-eye 3 usually miss this
Common Wood-Nymph 70 remarkable number
Monarch 3
Silver-spotted Skipper 2
Clouded Skipper 9
Fiery Skipper 25
Tawny-edged Skipper 5
Crossline Skipper 3
Southern Broken-Dash 10
Aaron's Skipper 14 second best state count ever
Yehl Skipper 6
Broad-winged Skipper 25
Palatka Skipper 25
Dion Skipper 12
Dun Skipper 2
Lace-winged Roadside-Skipper 1
Twin-spot Skipper 7
Salt Marsh Skipper 12
Ocola Skipper 4
---------------
31 species
Harry LeGrand
Raleigh, NC
Part 2 (from Jeff):
As Harry indicated, we did indeed feed some mosquitoes, but we saw some
great leps & other things as well! Here are some butterfly pics from
yesterday:
http://www.duke.edu/~jspippen/butterflies/greatpurplehairstreak.htm
(top pic)
http://www.duke.edu/~jspippen/butterflies/southernpearlyeye.htm
(bottom pic)
http://www.duke.edu/~jspippen/butterflies/aaronsskipper.htm
(all pics)
http://www.duke.edu/~jspippen/butterflies/broadwingedskipper.htm
(8th row down)
http://www.duke.edu/~jspippen/butterflies/palatkaskipper.htm
(bottom row)
While I didn't get any pics of the bears, here are a couple of other
dangerous organisms we found:
http://www.duke.edu/~jspippen/plants/toxicodendron.htm
(bottom 2 pics)
http://www.duke.edu/~jspippen/herps/canebrakerattlesnake.htm
(bottom pic, only a portion visible in a hole)
http://www.duke.edu/~jspippen/naturephotos/fiddlercrab.htm
(top pic, ok, maybe not as dangerous as above...)
Cheers,
Jeff
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jeffrey S. Pippen
Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences
Rm A-241 LSRC Bldg, Box 90328
Duke University, Durham, NC 27708
PH: (919) 660-7278
http://www.duke.edu/~jspippen/nature.htm
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^:
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