northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's an Appalacian Brown I met in the waning days of summer.  I've shown an open-winged one before , though this view makes it a little easier to ID them. They're very similar to the Eyed Brown , but notice the dark lines on the underside of the wing. In an Eyed Brown, those lines should be much more zig-zaggy. I don't think we have many Eyed Browns around here, but it's probably a good idea to ID these carefully. (From a view of the top of the wing it would be awfully difficult to distinguish these guys.) Another butterfly that has a similar wing pattern that you can definitely find around here is the Northern Pearly-eye . You're supposed to tell them apart because the Northern Pearly-eye has light, nearly-white fringe around its eyespots. All 3 of these species are, as you might suspect, related .  September 8, 2022 at Fairview Farm Photo 248397096, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

Here's a Northern Pearly-eye , another butterfly that may look familiar even though I haven't shown one before. They look pretty similar to the Appalachian Brown I posted about over the winter (though the picture was from August of 2021). The main difference is probably that the Northern Pearly-eye has a little white around its eyespot wing markings. As close as those two butterflies may be, the Northern Pearly-eye looks even more like the Southern Pearly-eye ; fortunately that species rarely shows up in NJ, since distinguishing between them would probably exceed my ability. Though my field guides and some online documentation put the browns ( Satyrodes ) and pearly-eyes ( Enodia ) in different genera, it looks like the Taxonomy Gods have now decided they both belong in the Lethe genus . I suspect that our relatively new ability to look at genetic codes triggers a lot of these rearrangements. Note that they got their name from the white inside most of their eyespots, which rem...