Swarthy Skipper

Here's a Swarthy Skipper from last summer. Why swarthy? From this view where you see the underside of the wings, it looks like a fairly light brown butterfly. If you see the top view of the wings though, you should see more of a dark gray or light black color. So this fella might have a swarthy side that you just can't see in this picture.

These guys are, like a lot of the skippers I see, a grass skipper, meaning that they use some type of grass as host plants when they're caterpillars. Though most sources say they'll only use Little Bluestem [1] grass as a host, at least one suggested they'll also use some other unnamed grasses.

The Swarthy Skipper was first documented as a species in 1824 by the French entomologist Pierre Andre Latreille [2]. AFAIK Latreille never journeyed to America, so I'm assuming someone sent him butterflies (he also documented our Tawny-edged Skipper) and other insects to him in France where he determined which ones were new species and documented them.

August 5, 2021 at Duke Farms
Photo 148952414, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


[1] Little Bluestem can grow 1-4 feet in height, which doesn't seem all that little too me, but is quite a bit smaller than Big Bluestem, which grows 6-10 feet in height.

[2] Latreille was famous for having gotten out of prison thanks to a beetle. Latreille was imprisoned after the French Revolution for refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the new French state. He only got out when he identified a rare beetle species in prison; the prison doctor recognized his worth as a scientist and worked to get him released. Latreille and the doctor were friends for life after this; I'm less sure of his relationship with the beetle.

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