{"id":53,"date":"2015-05-31T17:09:43","date_gmt":"2015-05-31T21:09:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mbsnews\/?p=53"},"modified":"2015-05-31T17:11:39","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T21:11:39","slug":"a-quartet-of-skippers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mbsnews\/2015\/05\/31\/a-quartet-of-skippers\/","title":{"rendered":"A Quartet of Skippers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The next two weeks offer a narrow\u00a0window of opportunity to find four species of skippers. \u00a0These species are certainly underrepresented in the MBS database. \u00a0I hope you will make a special effort to collect or photograph these species in your sampling areas.<\/p>\n

The first is Juvenal’s Duskywing, one of the spread-winged skippers. \u00a0Most of the 190 records are from southern Maine although we have some records from Washington County and even one from the Western Mountains.\"Hesperiidae<\/a><\/p>\n

Note the white spots on the tips of the forewings. \u00a0In Dreamy Duskywing (as in the rare Sleepy Duskywing), those white spots are lacking.\u00a0You can think of the white spots as being closed in the latter two species, accounting for the Sleepy and Dreamy portions of the common names.<\/p>\n

The remaining three species are all members of the grass skipper subfamily. The Indian Skipper’s distribution seems to be mostly a\u00a0broad swath from coastal York County northeastward to Washington County.<\/p>\n

\"Hesperiidae<\/a><\/p>\n

The Indian Skipper is most likely to be confused with the Long Dash. The light rectangles on the underside hindwing are arranged in an L in Indian Skipper; these rectangles in Long Dash are arranged in a crescent.<\/p>\n

The host plants of Indian Skippers are various species of grasses so meadows and fields are the places to look for this species.<\/p>\n

The last two species, Pepper and Salt Skipper and Common Roadside Skipper, often co-occur. I don’t have photos of these two species but Bob and Rose Marie Gobeil have some nice shots of the Pepper and Salt Skipper at their Maine Butterfly site<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A glance at the current distribution of Pepper and Salt Skipper shows records<\/a> from all over the state with many gaps. \u00a0The same is true for the distribution<\/a> of the Common Roadside Skipper. \u00a0Opportunities for township records abound for everyone. \u00a0Dirt roads and mud puddles are the place to look for these two dark grass-skippers.<\/p>\n

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The next two weeks offer a narrow\u00a0window of opportunity to find four species of skippers. \u00a0These species are certainly underrepresented in the MBS database. \u00a0I hope you will make a special effort to collect or photograph these species in your … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[228029,228028],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mbsnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mbsnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mbsnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mbsnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mbsnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mbsnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mbsnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/57"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mbsnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mbsnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mbsnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}