northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's a Sleepy Orange Butterfly I saw as a part of the basically-annual Duke Farms butterfly count. This is a day when some local lepidopterists , some Duke Farms staff, and some Duke Farms volunteers (I'm in this last category) gather at Duke Farms to count butterflies. Generally we split up into 2-3 groups to cover different areas of the property, count the butterflies we're able to identify (sometimes they fly off before we can tell what the butterfly was), and then the results get combined into a report. The butterflies are not collected or even caught - this is a purely observational event. The Sleepy Orange is one of the more interesting stories to come out of the butterfly count. Two years ago the lepidopterists were excited to see a Sleepy Orange Butterfly, and then another one, and then another one. After they got to maybe a dozen of them, they were not as excited by seeing them, though the big story was that it wasn't known that Sleepy Oranges were in Somers...