Pilot Mountain/Surry County NABA Count – Aug 24, 2016

8 observers put in several hours on Aug 24 for the Pilot Mountain/Surry County butterfly count. Temps 73-83, mostly cloudy skies. From mountain summit, to feeder creeks, corridor trail and Yadkin river section of the park, more habitat than we had time to cover, lots of nectar, thistle was boomin!

From Lori Carlson: I have a photo album up on Flickr that contains the suspected Cloudeds. The album link is here: https://www.flickr.com/gp/shrone/7627D5

Tentative results below. 52 sp.

8 Pipevine Swallowtail
7 Black Swallowtail
321 E Tiger Swallowtail
12 Spicebush Swallowtail

2 Cabbage White
24 Clouded Sulphur
24 Cloudless sulphur
1 Little Yellow
69 Sleepy Orange

5 Gray Hairstreak
2 Red-banded Hairstreak
35 E tailed blue
26 Summer Azure

1 American Snout
17 Variegated Fritillary
34 Great Spangled Fritillary
520 Silvery Checkerspot
75 Pearl Crescent
2 Question Mark
3 American Lady
4 Red Admiral
21 Common Buckeye
12 Red-spotted Purple
1 Viceroy
1 Tawny Emperor
1 Southern Pearly-eye
1 Creole Pearly-eye
15 Northern Pearly-eye
3 Appalachian Brown (new site that should be reliable!)
8 Gemmed Satyr
1037 Carolina Satyr
1 Common Wood-nymph
7 Monarch

4 Silver-spotted skipper
1 horaces duskywing
1 Common checkered-skipper
9 Common Sootywing (new site)
2 Swarthy Skipper
18 clouded skipper
45 least skipper
2 fiery skipper
3 Pecks skipper
4 Tawny-edged skipper
10 Crossline skipper
1 norhtern broken dash
6 little glassywing
382 sachem
52 deleware skipper
14 zabulon skipper
1 Dun skipper
1 Common Roadside-skipper
1 EUFALA SKIPPER (new site, photographed by most of us!)

Misses include Zebra swallowtail, orange sulphur, eastern comma, painted lady, hackberry emperor, hoary edge, any cloudywing, lace-winged roadside skipper (looked hard in usual spots), southern broken dash and Ocola skipper.


Brian Bockhahn
birdranger248@gmail.com